RACING CAR FOR THE ROAD: IT'S ONE R of the great automotive clichés. And like most clichés, it's rarely true, of course. Even the hardest of hardcore sports cars are generally designed as road cars first and foremost, and if they do wind up on a GT racing grid at Spa or Silverstone, it's usually in a re-engineered, evolutionary form (or, depending on how relaxed the regs are, a clean-sheet design with only a passing resemblance to a distant road-going cousin).
But the wild-looking KTM X-Bow GT-XR you can see here really was designed as a racing car first- and subsequently house-trained into a productionised road car rather than the other way round. And it's evolved from the original, minimal X-Bow into something bigger, more potent - more supercar than sports car.
"Lots of customers of the original X-Bow told us: "It's a fun car, but it's a toy - I want a more 'adult' car," product manager Lukas Barth tells evo as he shows us around the sophisticated X-Bow production line in Graz, Austria. Now we are really in the adult sphere with this car.' The new X-Bow GT-XR's story starts back in 2018, when the four-cylinder turbocharged Audi engine that powered the first-generation X-Bow, launched in 2008, fell foul of tightening emissions regulations for homologation. That could have been the end of the X-Bow story, had the KTM board decided to call a halt to its car division - a relative minnow compared with its separate motorcycle companies and wider portfolio. But, happily, it saw the enforced engine change not as a dead end but an opportunity.
This story is from the June 2023 edition of Evo UK.
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This story is from the June 2023 edition of Evo UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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BEST BUYS BMW M CARS
THE PERFORMANCE CAR LANDSCAPE WOULD HAVE looked very different over the last five decades without BMW. Its M division, founded in 1972, has produced some of the best driver’s cars ever to hit the road, and in the process has provided a stream of benchmark models for its rivals to chase. In recent years, stricter emissions regulations, downsizing and electrification have seen some of those rival cars falter, yet by and large BMW’s M machines have remained strong. In fact, some rank among the greatest the department has made think of the eCoty-winning M2 CS and M5 CS while others are the only options worth recommending in their respective segments. Price tags have risen with performance, however, putting those latest offerings out of reach for many, but the marque’s popularity means there are numerous earlier M models available on the second-hand market for far more attainable figures. Here are four of our favourites.
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