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Michael Taylor25 Jan 2014
REVIEW

Donkervoort D8 GTO 2014 Review

What's got Ferrari-busting speed, goose-proof handling and sports-sedan ride quality? You won't believe the answer

Donkervoort D8 GTO

First Drive
Leylstad, The Netherlands

OVERVIEW
>> Audi’s cracking 2.5-litre, turbocharged five-cylinder engine in a proper, hard-core sports car
Ten or 15 years ago, the Dutch Donkervoort outfit was one of the best in the world at building clubman-style sports cars. And then it had a good idea, joined up with someone else’s idea and got screwed by big company politics.

And then the crisis hit. Founder Joop Donkervoort mortgaged his house to keep the wages pumping through to the factory floor while he put the finishing touches on the car designed to be Donkervoort’s crowning glory.

That car is the D8 GTO and it would be the very definition of a Go Big Or Go Home car, except that if it fails, Joop himself won’t have a home to go to.

Donkervoort is based in a town with no history or tradition, an invented city on an invented land, claimed from the sea only in 1960. The car company isn’t much younger, building the first of its Lotus 7-style clubmans in the 1970s.

It then became famous for stupendously fast, Cosworth-powered machines that would happily climb into the ring with whatever was throwing the hardest punches, merrily dancing up on its toes with sparkling balance.

With the five-speed manual, rear-drive GTO, it’s tried to take that to a whole new level, developing a new chassis, new suspension system, new cooling, new brakes, new, well… everything.

And all of it is geared up to exploit that classic Audi five pot.

It has taken something close to the quattro GmbH endurance racing spec, too, with 35kg of weight cut out of it and output lifted, in this Premium launch version, to 280kW and 475Nm.

Sure, there are more powerful machines out there, but the Premium GTO weighs just 695kg, or only 535kg more than that thumping motor.

PRICE AND EQUIPMENT
>> Strap yourself in, this might hurt
Including the base price, with 21 per cent tax, the D8 GTO is a €129,000 exercise in its home country. But that’s the base price.

By most standards, the base car will be a sharper tool than most you’ll find lurking on city streets, but why buggerize around with just 254kW of power and 450Nm?

The mid-sped D8 GTO Touring (no, it’s not a wagon) gets the same engine spec, but adds things like a carbon-fibre/Kevlar body, larger (18-inch, up from 17s all-round) rear wheels, a rear anti-roll bar and three-way adjustable dampers (up from two-way).

It also gets stronger, six-piston brakes, weighs 40kg less, is aerodynamically cleaner and has an adjustable traction control system.

It also costs another €30,165, but being Donkervoort, you can cherry pick the upgrades as you see that some of them are, taken individually, indeed scarily priced. The traction control is €3100, uprated dampers are €2400 and the anti-roll bar €1430.

Then there’s the Premium version, which is like our test car but with a few bits left off it. Not that it wants for much, getting the thumper engine spec (for the not-inconsiderable sum of €12,885 – or more than a new Volkswagen Polo), a louder exhaust at €1800, a thicker 12mm rear anti-roll bar at €2570, and a three-way adjustable damper setup that includes anti-roll control (€3250).

Not to mention lighter, stronger brakes (€2950), even better aero (€2640) and a €3900 version of the variable traction control, complete with a launch-control setup.

But that’s nothing. Donkervoort could teach BMW or even Ferrari a thing or two about making every option count. It will cost you €17,445 to pull 65kg out of the base car. You can carbon-fibre the body, but it will cost you €2850 and the same treatment in the interior will be €3850, but that’s only for most of the interior.

If you want the dash to be carbon (and get a digital display, alloy air vents and aircraft toggle switches), it’s another €2525. A quick-release suede steering wheel is another €1675.

You get the idea. Speed costs. How much do you want to fight the laws of diminishing returns at the top end of the D8 GTO’s envelope?

MECHANICAL

>> More complex than it looks. And better
This entire machine is based around two things: being strong enough to take advantage of the engine and being obsessively light to the point that someone in the engineering department needs a good lie down on a psychologist’s couch.

For example, each door is made of foam, Kevlar and carbon-fibre, passes all crash rules and is less than a kilogram. I mean, seriously, who does that?

It’s heavier than the old 1.8-litre, turbo D8 by 10kg, but that includes a longer, wider body to accommodate the bigger engine’s needs and it has three times more torsional rigidity.

It might seem simple, but it’s based around a spidery array of chromolly square tubing cut with lasers and copper welded in to tens of tiny triangles. But it’s not just a metal chassis because it also uses carbon-fibre to keep things rigid.

“The tension in the tubular frame is from the pushing and twisting and it’s pulling tension for the carbon fibre,” Donkervoort explained.

And inside all of this is the engine, low and behind the front axle line, mated to a five-speed Tremec manual gearbox and a Quaife mechanical limited slip differential.

We’ve always lauded Audi’s five-cylinder engine as a strong and smooth operator, but it was too heavy for Donkervoort. With quattro’s help, it pulled 35kg from it and it now weighs 160kg.

One quick short cut was to dump the massive alternator (Donkervoort doesn’t heat the seats or run sat nav) and use a Volkswagen Lupo (a long-defunct sub-Polo model) alternator instead.

Then it dumps the flywheel, the entire air intake system, the oil filter and the auxiliary drive from the front, which isn’t much good on a longitudinal application.

The key to the D8 GTO, though, isn’t this engine. It’s the chassis and the suspension beneath it all.

Designed by Mr Donkervoort and former Maserati chief chassis engineer, Paul Fickers, it uses two-chamber, Dutch Intrax dampers in concert with a three-stage adjustable anti-roll bar system.

The damper units sit inside a double wishbone front end and a multi-link rear and the car rides on 255/45 ZR17 Toyo Proxes R1R (there’s also an R888 semi-slick in the catalogue if this isn’t enough grip).

If we told you Donkervoort chose an Italian supplier for the brakes, you’d probably assume Brembo. And you’d be wrong. Instead, it uses Tarox units, with six pistons and 20mm-thick discs.

“We don’t use carbon fibre brakes,” Mr Donkervoort said. “Weight is one thing, but we have problems keeping even the steel brakes hot and the car is too light for off-the-shelf carbon-fibre brakes to stay hot.”

There is no power assistance for the think-it-quick steering rack and there is no extra boosting or anti-lock system for the brutally strong brakes.

ON THE ROAD
>> Simply the best in the world at what it does
There’s no nonsense from the Donkervoort family and it’s 25 employees, and there’s no nonsense from the car. It’s light, calm when you want it to be and wickedly quick, in a completely predictable way, the rest of the time.

And no fight is ever lopsided against a GTO because it’s the honey badger of the sports car world. It refuses to be beaten down, it keeps coming back and it will never, ever concede the speed.

The thing is, you expect it to be fast. You don’t expect it to be this fast. You don’t expect wait-a-minute-while-I-recalibrate fast.

During its final Nardo tests, it pulled 0-100km/h sprint times of 3.0 seconds starting in first gear but just 2.8 when they launched it in second. It’s still a sub-five car if you launch it in third gear…

From there, even its stubby aero profile doesn’t stop it bursting from 100 to 200km/h in 5.8 seconds and it will stretch up and out to 270km/h -- though wear a helmet because your eyes are going to be punching out tears like a fire hydrant by then.

It augurs well for future buyers that our test car was actually Donkervoort’s sole prototype and development mule and had done all of the electrical, mechanical and prototype testing, plus all the validation work. And it still felt rock solid.

The real underscore of the GTO’s genius is that it’s the only car that runs this magnificent engine whose character isn’t defined by it. There is so much else going on in the GTO that the engine becomes, astonishingly, a bit player.

Even with all of its weight trimmings, the interior is luxurious, in its own way. The door opens slightly upward and you slide down and in, open-wheeler style, with your feet sliding into a tiny footwell and atop tiny pedals.

The seats are very tight, but surprisingly supportive. The steering and the pedals are both straight and its chunky gear lever is instinctively sited.

There’s a red cover that you have to flick up for the start toggle, and instead of sat nav, the biggest dial you’ll find on the dash is for the brake bias adjuster.

There are three other standout dash features that you don’t normally see: the variable traction control dial, a launch-control mode and a two-stage Sport mode.

Every time you step into the GTO, you know you’re about to do something special and it doesn’t ever hide that from you.

For starters, you know how the Audi five pot’s sound invokes a Group B S1 quattro rally car echoing and howling through the Finnish forestry? Well, it doesn’t sound anything like that because that’s not the engine’s natural sound, which is all Donkervoort wants it to sound like.

It’s still smooth and clean revving, but it doesn’t sound anything like an Audi.

It moves off calmly, effortlessly and strongly, with no histrionics, at least until you get serious. It’s easy to drive at low speed, especially with all that torque, but that’s hardly the point, is it?

Mash the throttle hard and the GTO’s character changes, instantly reacting with the turbo screaming and whistling. It delivers far more of that scream than the sophisticated bellow this engine has in Audis.

Donkervoort didn’t want to hide the workload you ask of the engine, so it’s happy to let its whines and groans and timbre changes saturate the cabin. In return, the car does nothing to hide the raw speed that workload generates.

The GTO doesn’t accelerate and it doesn’t punch you in the back. It detonates. Full-throttle acceleration in the GTO feels like being the last pellet in a shotgun shell. You can see the metal in front of you and you’re right on top of the explosion. And you’re flying.

There’s nothing subtle about the power delivery in a straight line and as a driver, you don’t attack the GTO. It helps you attack anything else.

Clubman bodies have their obvious limitations, though, the biggest of which is the way you get smashed by the wind above 140km/h. The amazing thing about the GTO is that it’s just so comfortable when you aren’t pushing.

Aside from the wind buffeting (which you can fix in five minutes by putting the roof up), the GTO rides no harder than cars like the BMW M5 or the Audi RS6/7 twins and, in some conditions, it rides a lot better.

Square-edged bumps that can perplex the most complex of air suspensions are treated with a gliding serenity that seems to defy everything the GTO looks like it should be about.

There’s no crunching, no thumping and you could easily leave half a cup of water on the dashboard over a broken piece of cobbled road without spilling a drop.

That can lead you to worry that it will be found wanting in corners. But it isn’t. It glows white hot. The GTO is born for corners, with the extra pressure forcing the dampers to switch to their harder valving.

You can initially be a bit disconcerted by its inability to stop, but that goes away when you get some heat in the brakes.

And then it comes together so seamlessly and coherently that you have to recalibrate. You attack the same corner harder and harder until, at its very outer edges, you find some turn-in understeer (Donkervoort can dial out even this with an optional rear anti-roll bar).

By then, though, you’re charging into corners a full gear higher than would be possible in anything else that carries this engine.

It corners with a remarkably flat body, as though it’s keeping its weight distribution exactly where it wants it, not where the road wants it to go.

And, even when it finds its own front-end limits, it’s still progressive enough to let the skilled dial out the turn-in understeer any way they prefer: steering input, braking, lift off, added throttle… no road legal car can shift its weight around its stance as easily and willingly as this, nor to greater effect.

There are the brakes, shining with heat and, with minimal assistance, they need a lot of power but reward you with seemingly infinite progressiveness.

The steering, also unassisted, is wickedly sharp when it changes direction and the harder you push, the heavier it can feel. It’s best to have some upper body work before you get in or, like a day spent karting with your mates, you’re going to feel it come winter.

But you can see the front wheels, turning beneath their mudguards, and you can place them within millimetres of where you want them to be, every time.

It’s happy on short, sharp corners, but its wheelbase is long enough to manage sweepers and double apex bends with the same aggressive authority.

And you can get on the throttle earlier and earlier coming out of corners, because that complex, precise rear end will push out of line only on severe provocation. Then it will either stay there like a drift car or regather itself on the merest throttle correction to drive forward, fast.

And you dive deeper and deeper into the Donkervoort and you get happier and happier until you arrive at a point where there’s nothing else in the world that matters.

Is it perfect? Of course it isn’t. It’s an awful (aweful?) lot of money for a simplistic gadget and the five-speed ‘box often feels one cog short, but then six would have demanded a longer wheelbase and added weight.

The D8 GTO only uses around 8.0L/100km (157g/km of CO2) anyway and cruising at highway speeds isn’t what it’s built for. That said, its ride makes it more comfortable than you might imagine for cross-continental drives and its flat-floored tail allows it to carry a surprising amount of luggage.

But try finding another new car that goes, handles and is put together as well as this one for less. Let me know how you go.

2014 Donkervoort D8 GTO pricing and specifications:
Body:
Two-door Clubman roadster
Layout: Front-mid engine, rear-drive
Engine: 2.5-litre, in-line five cylinder, direct fuel injection, turbo charger
Bore x stroke: 82.5mm x 92.8mm
Capacity: 2480cc
Compression ratio:10:1
Power: 280kW @ 5500rpm
Torque: 475Nm @ 1700rpm
Transmission: Five-speed Tremec gearbox
Weight: 695kg
Power-to-weight: 2.48kg/kW
Power per tonne: 403kW
0-100km/h: 2.8 seconds
0-200km/h: 8.6 seconds
Top speed: 270km/h
Fuel consumption: 8.0L/100km (combined)

What we liked: Not so much:
>> Brilliant chassis poise >> Not much of a looker
>> Brutally fast from all revs >> It costs plenty, and then some
>> And it even rides well >> High-speed aero buffeting

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Written byMichael Taylor
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