Porsche v Lotus v BMW v TVR: used six-cylinder sports cars go head-to-head

SpectraFlair. Other car companies might have used DuPont’s wild iridescent paint system, but none employed it to better effect than TVR. It’s a point being proved to us in spectacular style by this glorious T350C, rainbow-like bursts of diffracted light dancing across its bodywork as it basks in the autumn sunshine.

It might have temporarily stolen the show, but the T350C has some impressive company in our gathering of modern classic sports coupes. Joining it from the ’00s is the Z4 M Coupé, while the ’10s are represented by the Evora Sport 410 and 981 Cayman GT4. Four more different characters you couldn’t wish to meet.

> Four affordable used Japanese performance car icons

It’s a magnificent if rather melancholy group. TVR is gone. Lotus is on life support. BMW has no plans to replace the current Z4 with a dedicated sports car. Even Porsche is in a pickle, having executed a hasty handbrake turn on its plans to supplant the outgoing Cayman with an EV-only successor. Glory days and end of days in one neat test.

We’re told the reason for this depressing atrophy is lack of interest in sports cars, but that’s hard to believe when you’re presented with this pulse-quickening scene. Legislation certainly hasn’t helped the cause. The need for safer, quieter, less polluting cars has driven the market towards bigger, heavier, less raucous products. The result? A reflexive outcome where the cars become less desirable so fewer people buy them. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Better, then, to remind ourselves how good we had it. And how good we still have it, by celebrating the fact that the most expensive of these cars (the GT4) can be had for new Audi RS3 money, with the cheapest (the Z4 M Coupé) available for rather less than a new Polo GTI.

Finally, to ensure your humble scribe doesn’t indulge in a rose-tinted nostalgia trip, we’ve brought along our youthful control judge, Yousuf Ashraf. Just three years old when TVR launched the T350(!) he will be driving all four cars for the very first time.

We’re both in for a treat. All are manual. All are powered by great-sounding six-cylinder engines. All are comfortably sub-1500kg (the TVR is sub-1200kg!) and all pre-date ADAS, big screens, capacitive switches and endless dynamic modes. In short, what you see is what you get. Which in the case of the TVR is something truly extraordinary.

The paint plays its part, but whatever the colour a T350 looks sensational. Its brutally chopped tail and pointed nose give it a dagger-like profile, while the 18-inch ‘Spider’ alloys are greased into the wheelarches for the tautest of stances. TVRs of the era were fearless in this regard. Unconventional too: witness the Swiss cheese perforations in the rear valance and the door release buttons in the underside of the mirrors. While some of the finishing lets it down, the overall effect is as stimulating as it is unmistakable.

The interior is just as adventurous, with a riot of curvaceously sculpted dash, door and transmission tunnel padding. Neat but unlabelled aluminium switches (made in-house) and a pair of beautiful round analogue dials supplemented by an equally nice LCD display showing the T350’s vital signs complete a fine cockpit.

You have to fold yourself into the car, ducking your head beneath the rakish roofline, but once in there’s a decent amount of space and good visibility. The crash structure is essentially a roll-cage, which is wrapped in leather but clearly visible as it forms the header rail and A-pillars before following the roofline back behind your head and dropping into the space behind the seats to complete the cage.

It’s so nice to rest your thumbs on the spokes of the wonderful Personal steering wheel. That’s something owner Colin Bysouth is just getting used to, having purchased the car (from specialist James Agger Autosport) only a week prior to our test. He’ll also have to get used to the fact that the pedals are offset away from the T350’s centreline, which suggests clearance was needed for the gearbox bellhousing. The pedals themselves are alloy and floor-mounted, so they have a slightly unusual arc. The throttle has a l-o-o-o-n-g travel, so you really need to stretch your foot down into the footwell to give it full beans.

That’s deliberate, as there’s no TC or ESC, TVR preferring to give you a progressive throttle so you can meter the power without intervention. There’s no ABS either, so you really do focus on your pedal inputs, especially in the heavy rain we encounter on Day 1 of our test. In truth, once you get yourself dialled in you soon gain confidence in your judgement – and respect for the way TVR gauged the throttle and brake response.

Less admirable is the steering. It’s quick and falls short on feel, so you tend to find yourself over-steering (as opposed to oversteering), at least until you learn to reduce your steering inputs. Once this clicks, you can guide the T350 accurately, but it always requires a bit of thought.

Though first impressions are of a car that feels a bit edgy, it’s actually transparent and faithful in what it does. You just need to treat it with respect. Faster corners are the ones where you just squeeze it through with the smallest steering input you can, because it’s in that initial degree or two of steering turn that the car reacts most sharply. Once it has some lateral load you know where you stand with it, the inherent grip and balance coming to the fore.

These moorland roads are a stern test of ultimate wheel travel and body control, two things the TVR lacks. It’s a trait common to Tuscans and Cerberas of the period (less so the Sagaris) and it’s the main limiting factor in the speed you can carry over less than smooth tarmac. Where modern high-performance cars tend to isolate you from what’s going on, the T350 gives you everything, warts and all.

The star of the show is unquestionably the 3.6-litre Speed Six engine. At 350bhp it’s slightly milder than TVR’s full-house 4-litre found in the bigger cars, but it’s still a magnificent engine. Especially as the T350C (that’s C for coupe, by the way; there was also a targa, the T350T) weighs just 1187kg. Razor-sharp with a fabulous appetite for revs and a soundtrack straight from the Goodwood Revival TT race, it’s mated to a trusty Borg Warner/Tremec five-speed manual gearbox, which has a weighty, mechanical shift that’s a joy to use. This might be an unconventional take, but it occurs to me it’s how you’d hope a restomodded David Brown-era Aston Martin might feel.

Like me, Yousuf is a bit shocked by the rawness of the TVR’s chassis set-up, but equally smitten by the overall experience: ‘I don’t think it’s possible to have a boring drive in the TVR,’ he says. ‘The design and interior are spectacular and the engine dominates everything. It’s a rumbly, heavy-hitting engine; such a shock compared to modern engines. The throttle travel is really long so you have to fully commit to rev it out, but when you do the noise and muscularity are so addictive. The rest of the car can’t keep up though, so you really need to concentrate to drive it quickly.

‘On the bumpiest sections it’s really busy, and at times it felt like it was going to throw me out of my lane. And the light, quick steering seems like a bit of a mismatch for the character of the car. But I’m surprised by how friendly it is when you really push. It almost seems to calm down when it loses traction, and the power delivery is really manageable. I wouldn’t want to try keeping up with the others in it, but there’s plenty to enjoy.’

After the T350 it makes sense to swap into its noughties rival, the Z4 M Coupé. Though polarising in period, the two-door fastback E86 only gets more appealing as time passes. The last M car to feature the fabulous S54 straight-six and one of the best pieces of Bangle-era flame-surfacing design, it’s a world away from BMW as we know it today.

It’s amazing what a wheel swap can do for a car. Strangely gawky on its original 18-inch split five-spoke rims, the Z4 is totally transformed by the fitment of E46 CSL alloys, which are an inch larger in diameter and half an inch wider front and rear. We normally insist on testing standard-spec cars, but in the case of Paul Candler’s fine example we’ll give it a bye, because CSL rims are the option the factory should have offered but never did.

In period the Z4 M Coupé was always the poor relation to the E46 M3. That seems counter-intuitive given it’s the bespoke sports car and not derived from a four-door saloon, but you can’t ignore the inconvenient truth that the M3 was more conventionally handsome and delivered the more complete driving experience. On the flipside, as a modern classic ownership proposition the Z4 doesn’t appear to suffer from the E46’s well-documented corrosion, buckled boot floor and VANOS issues. And it’s much rarer.

Step straight from the TVR into the Z4 and the similarities are profound. They share almost identical proportions, side profiles and powertrain recipes: the BMW straight-six beats the TVR for specific output thanks to its smaller capacity (104bhp per litre versus 97) but delivers less outright power (338bhp at 7900rpm). The BMW also weighs significantly more, though it’s still light by today’s standards at 1420kg.

It feels more cramped in the Z4 than the T350, but there’s a greater depth of quality and OE fit and finish. Where you can see glue showing between joins in the TVR’s leather trim, the BMW is neat and tidy, though placement of the window switches – awkwardly inclined on the door armrests – and the afterthought infotainment screen suggest a bit of improvised positioning from the design team. Visibility is a little more restricted and you have a greater sense of sitting on the back axle with the front wheels set waaaay ahead of you. It’s a defining aspect of the Z4, something that shapes the way you feel when driving it.

The engine is an absolute firecracker. This later S54 engine features double VANOS (variable timing on inlet and exhaust valves) and a fly-by-wire throttle, so it’s sharp as a tack. Its note begins as a brittle cackle, works through a bassy mid-range and finally hits a sparkling, vibrato top-end. Under full load there’s more than a hint of McLaren F1 to its timbre, which isn’t a bad claim to fame.

You could only get the Z4MC with a manual transmission. It’s a six-speed, but not the same one found in the E46 as that was physically too long for the truncated chassis. Unlike the rest of the Z4 range, the M Coupé and M Roadster got HPAS instead of EPAS. They also got a different ECU, so remaps that work on M3s won’t work on Z4 Ms.

Beyond the rearward seating position, first impressions are dominated by the choppy ride, and steering that’s both weightier and dartier than you’d expect. The M Coupé got quicker steering than the Roadster, which in turn had quicker steering than non-M models. There’s more sense of steering connection than in the TVR, but where the T350 matches steering rate with turn-in bite, the Z4 feels a little short on front-end grip. It’s not an issue in tighter turns, where you can work with bigger steering and throttle inputs to adjust the balance, but medium-to-fast corners combine a sensation of mild understeer with building load at the rear. You know you’re going to have to blend out of the throttle to help the front end but feel reluctant to do so because that seems certain to unsettle the rear. It makes for a car that’s trickier than it should be to balance, but still rewarding when you commit and initiate the right sequence of inputs.

Drive it hard enough and you’ll find the limit of the brakes sooner than you might imagine. Initially they offer decent bite, progression and stopping power, but they do begin to grumble in protest when worked hard. Considering they were donated by the E46 CSL you might expect better, but BMW brakes were notoriously weak throughout the noughties. I’d just forgotten how far they’ve come since.

Pleasingly, despite knowing the Z4 M by reputation alone, Yousuf takes it at face value. He finds the flaws sure enough, but still recognises enough star quality to appreciate that this is an old-school M car with a great deal of appeal. ‘I enjoyed the BMW more than I thought I would,’ he tells me later. ‘I’ve heard they can be quite skittish and tricky, but at normal speeds I found lots to like. Mainly the engine. It’s so linear and responsive, and the exhaust has a distinctive rasp. I couldn’t help revving it out and changing gear just for the hell of it. Sport mode sharpens it up even more, which is nice for rev-matching but generally makes it a bit too eager and jumpy. The rest of the car feels tight and direct for its age, but the ride can be a bit lumpy and I didn’t always trust what the rear was doing. Sometimes it slides quite progressively but other times it snatches and fights for grip. On a bumpy road it’s a wild ride, but I had fun trying to tame it.’

After the pair of front-engined ’00s protagonists, it’s time to fast-forward a decade and try the ’10s Evora Sport 410. A relatively mild-mannered machine at launch, within a handful of years Lotus had dropped the Evora’s naturally aspirated 3.5-litre Toyota V6 in favour of an increasingly potent succession of supercharged iterations. The Sport 410 was shown at the 2016 Geneva motor show and signalled a shift towards a more aggressive style and character. In short, it made the Evora sexy.

Lotus hoped to build 150 cars per year, but a total of just 72 Sport 410s were completed before the model was superseded by the GT410 Sport a little over a year later. A scant 25 were sold in the UK, making it one of the rarest Lotus models of all. Andy Corkhill has owned this Fire Red example from new and joins us fresh from a six-hour drive down from Perthshire, a 300-mile journey he completed largely on A- and B-roads. Good lad!

It’s impossible not to look wistfully at the Evora. Launched with great fanfare, highly rated by the motoring media and embraced by customers, it endured during Dany Bahar’s chaotic tenure and contributed to the company’s resurrection under the leadership of Jean-Marc Gales.

The Sport 410 came midway through Gales’ time at the helm and was very much the product of his focus on the Lotus core values of lightness, performance and engagement. A small bump in power and torque lifted the supercharged Toyota-sourced V6’s outputs to 410bhp and 302lb ft, while deleting the rear seats, using carbon for some body parts, fitting special forged rims and carbon seats, and even removing 5.5kg of sound deadening resulted in 70kg of weight saving. You could even delete the air-con and infotainment to save a further 13kg. With so many combinations, pinning down a definitive kerb weight is tricky, but 1325kg feels about right.

There’s no doubt it looks the part. Sharper and more aggressive than the original Evora, it sits 5mm lower on firmer passive Bilstein dampers (25 per cent firmer at the front, 20 per cent at the rear) and Eibach springs. Together with a more pronounced aero package, which includes a large upswept ducktail, the Sport 410 has enough swagger to mean business without trying too hard. A direct rival for the Cayman GT4, it packed serious performance. Top speed was a claimed 190mph with a 4.0sec 0-60mph time. Suffice to say, expectations are high.

It’s pretty spartan inside. Especially with the skeletal carbon seats. The sills are lower than you might expect, which is welcome as the seats require care when dropping over the sharp-edged squab, but feel surprisingly comfortable once settled behind the wheel. The dashboard, door cards and infotainment look a bit homespun and certainly haven’t aged well, but it feels well enough put together and is surprisingly free from squeaks and rattles.

Forward visibility is good, the view through the windscreen framed by the front wheelarches. The rear-view mirror peeps through a letter-box aperture that affords a glimpse of the top-mounted supercharger and a few old-school louvres. You get a better view down the sides of the car, each flank looking like someone has pulled an ice cream scoop all the way along the top of the doors and then hollowed out the engine air intakes.

Steering and ride quality are two Lotus hallmarks that are very much present and correct in the Sport 410. The HPAS is weighty, resistance building with lateral load. You’re well centred within the car so it’s easy to read what the front and rear ends are doing, but it’s precise rather than playful. There’s a nice on-the-nose feel to its steering response, but because it’s keen to change direction you need to trust that the rear will follow suit.

The damping is nicely judged and works well on our moorland test loop, which is packed with crests, compressions and countless raggedy lumps and bumps. Impressively, it never feels like you’re finding the limit of wheel travel, and there’s precise control so you always have the sense that there’s something in reserve.

The engine and gearbox might not have the purebred pedigree of the BMW, TVR or Porsche’s, but in practice it’s a really exciting powertrain. The supercharged V6 never sounds less than epic but turns truly feral if you switch to Race mode. You sense there’s some inertia to its internals and flywheel, so it doesn’t gain and lose revs with the crispness of the others, but the way it delivers its power and torque is extremely impressive.

More than the other cars here you need to take more time to peel back the layers, but the Evora repays that investment with a nuanced driving experience that has genuine depth and sophistication. Yousuf concurs: ‘The Lotus is a really special car to look at and sit in, but learning how it needs to be driven took me some time. The relationship between the controls, particularly throttle, clutch and gearshift, isn’t as intuitive as in the Porsche. But once you get the speed up it starts to come together, the ride settles down and it flows better.

‘It sounds great too, much more exciting than an Emira, especially from the outside – although I bumped into the limiter a few times when revving it out, because it feels like there should be more to come after 7000rpm. I enjoyed it most on fast roads, because the damping finds its range and the steering feels precise and connected. Overall, it’s a really exciting car.’

It’s funny how time and context changes things. Back in 2015 when the 981 GT4 was launched, we all celebrated the fact that Porsche had finally given us the Cayman we’d always wanted, but then immediately proceeded to moan about it not having the engine from the GT3. Then, in a perfect example of ‘be careful what you wish for’, Porsche gave us that exact car in the 982-gen GT4 RS, only for us to complain that it made our ears ring and bruised our tailbones. We weren’t entirely wrong on either count, but it all serves to throw fresh light on the original.

There’s something just right about a GT department Porsche in white. That’s partly due to it looking like it’s ready to receive a racing livery and number roundels, but also because no-nonsense paintwork matches the ethos of the car. And inside feels just right, too. When the GT4 was launched, everyone went nuts for the optional fixed-back carbon 918 Spyder seats. This car has the mid-spec 18-way adjustable Sport seats and I have to say they suit the car just fine. In fact, unless I was going to spend more time on track than on the road, I’d say they are preferable; a view owner Richard Alexander shares.

The GT4 has rose-jointed suspension borrowed from the GT3, but the usual combination of two-way switchable PASM means you can toggle between optimum pliancy or maximum body control, though in truth either setting works well enough to leave well alone, unless the roads are especially lumpy or you’re pushing particularly hard.

This car looks especially purposeful thanks to a full geo set-up by Atherstone-based Center Gravity. Alexander uses the car enthusiastically on road and track so wanted a set-up that better ‘switched on’ the Cup 2s he uses for trackdays without making the car too nervous on the road. It’s running more camber front and rear, with small toe adjustments for more front-end bite without increased nervousness at the rear. It’s also a little lower (by 4mm at the front and 6mm at the rear). This kind of adjustability is a big part of the GT4’s appeal, but something we rarely if ever experience with press cars, so it’s fun to feel how this GT4 responds to targeted changes.

There’s definitely more on-centre wriggle in the steering, but it never deflects the Cayman from your chosen trajectory. In fact there’s a welcome whiff of 911 in the way the front-end communicates. It also serves to remind what a great job Porsche did with this EPAS system.

The GT4 isn’t as powerful as the Evora at 380bhp, and although it matches the Lotus for torque, the peak arrives at higher revs. Combined with gearing that’s noticeably tall in the lower gears, it means you don’t get the low-rev punch of the Evora (or indeed the TVR or BMW). That said, the Cayman’s not exactly lacking in tractability or outright go. And though the Carrera S-sourced flat-six isn’t as fierce or sharp as a GT3 engine, it’s way creamier and more special than the gritty Toyota V6 in the Lotus.

Of all the cars here, it’s easiest to find your feet in the Cayman. It has a flow and placeability that’s wholly intuitive and completely consistent, with a blend of calmness and response that feels natural and inspires immense confidence. The PTV limited-slip diff works beautifully in both wet and dry, hooking up early but working well with the front end so you can leverage traction against turn-in and bring the rear precisely into play. Such throttle adjustability is rare, especially in mid-engined cars, yet it’s a defining characteristic of the GT4. The brakes are another highlight, with huge power, progressive response and tireless stamina. Porsche just gets this stuff.

The clutch is meaty and the gearshift has an oiled precision that matches the TVR’s for satisfaction with a narrower gate for snappier shifts. It highlights the Evora’s knotty cross-gate feel and makes the Z4’s spring bias feel overly keen to snap to the 3rd/4th plane. It’s a pleasure to use and easy to execute heel-and-toe downshifts, though Sport mode gives you automated rev-matching.

Perhaps the GT4’s greatest success is in the way it engages you at all speeds. Playful in tight corners, happy to hustle through the trickier medium-to-high-speed turns and beautifully poised through the really quick stuff, it has a polish, poise and malleability that makes it more readily entertaining – if ultimately less serious – than a GT3 driven with the same commitment across the same roads.

Yousuf has plenty of modern Porsche experience – mainly in GT3s – but has never tried the original GT4. It’s fair to say he’s a fan: ‘I drove the GT4 immediately after the Lotus and felt more at home straight away. It’s a ten-year-old car but you still notice how Porsche sweated over the details, it’s so cohesive. Of the four it’s the easiest to drive quickly and, for me, the most satisfying. It’s so pure and precise, and it lets you drive it in any way you want. It’ll do neat and fast but it’s so predictable and progressive when you hustle it.

‘Being a GT product, I thought it’d be quite full-on, but it’s actually really civilised when you aren’t going for it. I could genuinely see myself driving one every day. In fact, as an all-round proposition I think I’d have more fun in a GT4 than a new GT3 on the road. I’d love to own one.’ You and me both.

The joy of these tests is you don’t have to pronounce a winner in the conventional sense. Still, it would be remiss not to at least attempt to summarise the pros and cons of each so that you can make up your own minds on which you’ll be hunting for in the online classifieds.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the GT4 is the most modern-feeling, capable car and by some margin. The gearing isn’t perfect but the Carrera-sourced engine rarely feels becalmed at low revs, loves high revs and is rich in character. The upside is a level of maturity and refinement that makes this more than a high days and holidays proposition.

The Evora’s appeal always was, and remains, more niche. It lacks the Porsche’s polish, but rewards with a level of purity and connection that’s uniquely Lotus. The interior is really showing its age and there are times when you feel the limitations in the Toyota-sourced powertrain, but the chassis’ poise, the big-hearted delivery and wild exhaust note provide ample compensation. It’s a truly affordable exotic.

Despite originating from very different backgrounds, the TVR and Z4 M Coupé are surprisingly similar, both in terms of striking looks and exceptional powertrain character, and in their somewhat compromised dynamics.

The TVR is quirky in the extreme, but the Z4 is also unconventional, and there’s a shared hot-rod quality to the boisterous way they both perform. You’d buy either on looks and engine alone, but their appeal extends beyond the obvious – at least if you’re prepared to look past their flaws. That both seem something of a steal right now only makes them more tempting.

Spending time with these cars has highlighted how far things have come in terms of quality, capability and sophistication. Only the Porsche truly stacks up against today’s expectations, but what the other three might lack in modernity, maturity or whole-car cohesion they compensate for with heart and personality.

Such fearless originality and refreshing diversity is in short supply these days. Grab one while you can.

Specs

Thanks to Richard Alexander, Colin Bysouth, Paul Candler and Andy Corkhill for allowing us to enjoy their wonderful cars.

This story was first featured in evo issue 339.