Alfaholics GTA-R vs MST Escort MKI vs Porsche 912c By Kamm: The Restogods | Top Gear

When you strip cars back to their essence, remove the touchscreens and the driver assistance and look for what makes us fall in love with them, what makes them feel alive, it all comes down to… These – pistons thrashing up and down. And, ideally, as many of them as possible. Six, eight, ten, twelve, maybe even sixteen. Because interesting, exciting cars need interesting, exciting engines. What would be your number one? The V12? Think Ferrari, the McLaren F1 or perhaps a screaming Cosworth as fit

ted in the Aston Valkyrie or Gordon Murray T.50. Or maybe it's a V8, which covers everything from a Chevy small-block to a twin-turbo AMG. Then there are the layouts that companies have made their own. Bugatti's throbbing W16, the flat-six that is only truly at home behind the rear axle of a Porsche 911 or conversely, the V10 that BMW, Lamborghini, Lexus and Audi have all failed to make their own. But does it always have to be about the biggest, noisiest, most dramatic and complex? What about th

e four-cylinder? It's the humblest engine there is. Well, I want to show you that four-cylinders can be genuinely thrilling. So I've lined up three cars, all powered by a four. Yes, even that one. We tend to think fours are what power ordinary cars, cars that only have cylinders because they haven't gone electric yet. It's the beigest cylinder count there is. Beige?! Beige?! There's nothing beige about this. And pretty much nothing more mass market either. Because this is a Ford Escort. Listen t

o it go! Back in the 70s, the barriers between your happy shopper and motorsport were paper thin. Into rallying? You'll have heard of the BDA engine. Back in the 70s, Ford asked Cosworth to develop them a new 1.6-litre sports engine for the Escort RS1600. "BDA" stood for "belt drive" and "A" because it was the first of its type. This… this is the BDG. Development continued. This was then a 2-litre, now runs on a modern ECU with throttle bodies and fuel injection, and the small matter of 250 hors

epower, at 9,000rpm. It is a blast to drive, with an engine that feels as tough as it sounds. That ultra-distinctive induction that ideally needs to be accompanied by the shot blast of gravel on its underside. The hunger for revs, throttle response and immediacy are astonishing. It's full-on. I mean properly, genuinely full-on. This is a Tarmac rally car. Short geared, absolutely enthralling and with just an epic engine up front, but so much noise and fury and vibration. You sit upright, as you

should – it's a rally car. Grab gears, grab it by the scruff and hurl it about. It revels in punishment and abuse. You get the feeling it would be one of those cars where something would only go wrong when it was driven gently. But you'd never do that because the take-no-prisoners Escort is one of the most addictive driving experiences around. It's the work of MST Cars, who were a rally parts supplier until they worked out they had all the parts needed to build a car from scratch. So that's why

this wears a new numberplate. It is new from the ground up. Doesn't use an old chassis or any other old bits. Oh, my God! Around corners, this front end is so sharp. And the back end's just slightly soft, it rolls. You can tell it wants to roll into oversteer. The steering is fast, sharp and accurate and traction from those fat back tyres is fantastic. But at the same time, I've never driven another car that can be provoked into oversteer more readily or was happier when driven with a bit of ang

le. Oh, it's absolutely irresistible this car. It's so accurate, you barely use any steering at all. And talk about a car being in its natural environment. This blasting through woodland, even on Tarmac, just feels so right. So right! Those little Mini-like wheels paddling the ground for all they're worth. And special mention for this gearbox, which is so tight it's like it's got an open metal gate because you just can't get it wrong. You can't mis-shift. I know there's plenty of other options f

or £100,000, but for pure driving enjoyment? Ha! Come on! What I love about rallying is that they just want everything to be simple, tough and predictable. It just needs to work. There's a few parts in here you'd never have found on an Escort in period. The ignition barrel comes from a Renault. The column stalk is from a Mercedes Sprinter van. There's full adaptive tractive suspension with a screen, so you can increase or decrease the suspension stiffness. It's even got Bluetooth in it. But I lo

ve how pure and simple this interior is. The care and attention that's clearly gone into it and that's true everywhere. So let's pull over, cos I want to show you under the bonnet. Check this out. Need to show you under the bonnet of this. Open up the old motorsport catches. Right. Look at how clean it is, how immaculate, how beautifully labelled it is. And that engine as a centrepiece is stunning. 250 horsepower, four-cylinder, pushing along 950 kilos? I reckon that's a sweet spot. But MST, if

you really want more, will fit a 350 horsepower Millington Diamond engine and you can lose more weight because this is a steel-bodied car and that's quite a heavy bonnet. MST do a carbon-bodied version, which saves about 100 kilos. And speaking of carbon, this whole Porsche is carbon-bodied. It weighs well under 800 kilos. But it's not a 911. It's a 912, which means under its very, very lightweight engine cover is a four-cylinder engine, not a six. And I'll tell you more about that on the move.

Back in the early 60s, Porsche planned to discontinue the 356. But that would have left a hole in the range below the newly arrived 911, with its six-cylinder engine. So they did something very pragmatic, very Porsche. They took the engine from the 356 and shoved it in a 911. And it's not like Porsche chose to uprate the engine. It actually had less power in the 912 than it did in the 356 – 90 horsepower rather 95. Porsche made the exchange because it actually gave them more torque lower down th

e rev range. This, however, does not have 90 horsepower. No, this has a 190 horsepower. Because this is not an original 912, as you've probably guessed. It's the Kamm Manufacturing Porsche 912. It's a restomod. It's an old engine, tracing its roots back almost 100 years to the flat-four VWs of the 1930s. And compared to the Escort, it feels its age. You feel each cylinder pulse at low revs. It labours and doesn't rev anything like as eagerly as the others here. Until it gets to about 5,000, at w

hich point it fires off to the 7,000rpm cut-out like a GT3, and sounds and feels more like the six we know and love as well. That little one-six has been bored and stroked out to two litres and fitted with throttle bodies and modern injection. And, yeah, it's a bit different. Definitely a bit more like it. Flighty little car, though, especially on a typically Welsh day. It's July, for heaven's sake. You'd think the weather could buck its ideas up just for one day. Round the corner about two corn

ers back, I saw the sun. Now I can barely see 200 metres in front of me. This is, of course, a prototype and it's a bit mismatched as a result. The chassis is stiff, but the engine lazy, not least because the gearing is too long. It's a bit of a puzzle at the moment, and unlike the others here, doesn't have a clear idea of itself or what it's for. Now, this is Kamm's prototype, so there are some things they still need to do. The gear lever doesn't currently have any shelf centering on it, so you

've got to be careful, especially with the shift from fourth back into third. It's a dogleg first on this. The old rev counter needle bounces back and forth. That's going to be fixed. And the windows… If you want to lower the windows, you have to undo this little knob and then pull the window down at the moment. That's going to be replaced with a conventional winder. But as you can see, it's a very, very lightweight car, well under 800 kilos. This is all carbon. The whole body is carbon. There's

no weight to it at all. So it's getting deflected through the standing water. But, actually – and this is the secret to the 912 – it had a lot less weight in the back. And because it's got less weight, that engine is having less of an effect on the back axle. It doesn't leverage so much. So around corners, it's more progressive. It's got better front-to-rear balance. Softer springs are going to be fitted. At the moment, the ride is stilted and jittery and doesn't allow enough roll and movement

for the adaptive suspension to show what it can do. But you can tell the chassis is really well balanced and that the lighter four – Kamm reckons it saves around 120 kilos in total over the six – means the 912's dynamics are more predictable than an early 911's. And I suppose you could argue that gives it slightly less of that defined 911 character. But actually it has a charm all of its own, this car. It's not particularly quick, especially not by modern standards. But Kamm claims that it'll ke

ep up with a 996 GT3 round a racetrack. It certainly will carry speed in the dry. In the wet… Yeah, not quite so locked down. You've got to work for your speed here and the rewards aren't as great as in its rivals, but it's a prototype. There's still work to do, and it will get better. But the others set the bar very high indeed. Begs the question though, do any modern cars have great four-cylinder engines? Well, yes. Think of the Merc AMG A45's 420 horsepower, 2-litre. That's a brilliant engine

, but it's turbocharged because our bigger, heavier cars need more complex engines to deliver power and obey regulations. Not even Honda has managed to keep natural aspiration alive. In fact, the only mainstream, naturally aspirated, four-cylinder sports engine I can come up with is the Subaru-sourced flat-four in the Toyota GR86. Turbos don't have to rob noise and character. Think of the furious fours that were created when Subaru and Mitsubishi went head to head on a global rally stage. BMW to

ok its famous M10 engine, with a fair few modifications, all the way from the 2002 Turbo to race wins – and a lot of retirements – in Formula 1. And then there's Alfa Romeo, whose rasping four-cylinder engines always seem to be the best thing about whatever car they were fitted to. Oh, yes! So furious, this thing. A couple of years ago, I did a feature with Chris Harris. We rounded up the mightiest restored and modified cars – the Eagle E-Type, the Singer classic Porsche 911, the DB5 Continuatio

n, the GTO Engineering 250 Ferrari short wheelbase. We called it the Restogods, and I'm afraid you won't find a film on it. We only had one day, the insurance was bananas and the budgets wouldn't stretch. So instead, point yourself to TopGear.com or just type "Restogods" into your favourite search engine. So which of those bewitching cars was the most intoxicating, the most memorable to drive? Well, none of them. Because the car that absolutely blew me away that day was this – the Alfaholics GTA

-R. A car powered by only four cylinders. (Laughs) It is still just driving perfection. The engine fires smoothly, with little hint of the rasping character that's revealed as the revs rise. But wow, what an engine this is. Twin sparks per cylinder for leaner, faster combustion, chunky mid-range torque and a fiery yet beautifully musical top end. It's indulgent and addictive, as richly textured as any multi-cylinder masterpiece Italy has ever produced. So the Alfa Romeo series 105 traces its roo

ts back to 1962. But it was in 1965 that the GTA came along. "A" stood for "alleggerita", lightweight in Italian, and that introduced this 1.6-litre twin-spark engine. Now twin-spark technology was nothing new. It dates back to, like, 1914, where they developed it because it had cleaner and faster burn of petrol in the cylinder. It's a massive step on from the 60s icon it was back then. It's small, so that means you've always got line and trajectory options. You fit on the narrowest roads. It's

light, so it's got the agility of a wasp, and it sounds like you've got a million of them in harness when you accelerate. You sit a long way back in the chassis, bum almost on the back axle. It's a little more fluid and relaxed than the Escort, but just as communicative and confidence-inspiring. So you barrel over the ground, grabbing gears, muscling the steering, listening to four angry, angry cylinders and realise that almost nothing you've ever driven moves anything like as well as this. I wo

uldn't change a thing about it. I can see nothing worth improving. It drives as prettily as it looks. Ah, this Alfaholics is a work of genius. It's so fluent around corners. It rides bumps so well. It's not deflected easily. This sort of torque builds up in the steering. It's not too heavy around the straight ahead, but then you wind in and it gains weight as you turn it. It's just a little masterpiece, with a really angry engine up front. To be fair, I think the Escort's is even angrier and cer

tainly shorter geared. But, oh, this car. It's so desirable. Like MST with the Escort, Alfaholics has decades of experience, understands their cars inside out and knows exactly how to sympathetically modify them. The GTA-R is every inch the authentic 60s racing Alfa. Oh, look at this. I'm catching up with them. And what a beautiful little pair they make on these roads. Sure, these cars are all terrifyingly expensive. The cheapest, the Escort, is still 100,000 quid. The others are about three tim

es that. Supercar money and, yeah, they don't quite deliver supercar speed. But do you really need them to? What does a supercar do? It goes extremely fast for five seconds and then you've busted every speed limit going. These, you get to throw gears and revs at them for about three times as long. And all the while, you've got indulgent little chassis to use and these wonderfully crisp, short-geared engines. Oh, just look at these views. We've got Wales out ahead, the Escort just shot off a bit

in front. Everything's opening up, through moorland. These cars just feel so right in this location. So, yeah, I suppose what we've discovered is not that it's about the cylinder count particularly. It's about the types of cars that have four cylinders in them traditionally. It is about hot hatches. It is about older sports cars. And it doesn't have to be these three specifically. It can be an old Peugeot hot hatch, a Civic Type R, a Lotus Elise. These were the highlight. These were the heyday.

I miss it.