We head to the lakes in an Aston Martin DBX S, Toyota GR Yaris and an Audi Quattro 20v
The Lake District wouldn’t be so idiosyncratically Lakey, we can assume, if it weren’t for the rain.
It’s getting some today, but we have come prepared: we have three fantastic fast, four-wheel-drive performance cars at our disposal, along with three very keen drivers to crew them — although two of those drivers have considerably more impressive driving CVs than the third.
Outside the glassy surrounds of M-Sport’s showroom car collection, at Dovenby Hall, Cumbria, sit a brand-new, 717bhp Aston Martin DBX S; a nearly new, 276bhp Toyota GR Yaris; and a not-at-all-new, 217bhp, 1989 Audi Quattro 20v.
It’s the kind of trio that might just tempt a British rally champion turned rally test driver/rally team manager/rally team principal/UK motorsport business magnate and, as of June last year, FIA deputy president for sport, no less, to come out for a Sunday drive. Well, it’s a Tuesday — but you get the idea.
Malcolm Wilson OBE is a busy fella and probably wouldn’t ‘turn out’ for just anything. But having chatted with him at our recent Britain’s Best Driver’s Car shootout held here in the Lake District and at M-Sport’s HQ, I had a hunch that the Aston might tempt him (he has owned a DBX 707 for a while, and he loves it). The road-going version of the little Toyota that his team has been competing against in the WRC for the past few years might pique his interest, too.
The Audi Quattro was a bit of an afterthought — and we have already had to jump-start it once this morning, after reminding ourselves exactly where the 12V battery resides (bonus points if you know). But Wilson makes a beeline for the car, almost without pausing to look at the other two, and then makes it very apparent that he’s not for swapping keys with anyone.
His son Matthew — a world-class rally driver and a nine-time top-five WRC finisher himself, not to mention being current team boss for the M-Sport Dakar team — and I look at each other and laugh, and we divide the leftovers between us. And then we’re off. The mission today is to find out where two of the Lake District’s most famous petrolheads would go, and which routes they would take, to find some of the area’s greatest driving roads.
Autocar doesn’t venture up this way often, but recent road tests have rekindled our interest. It’s certainly the kind of area where local knowledge makes a big difference, especially if you want to avoid the crowds, walkers, cyclists and general tourist traffic.
I settle in to the Aston Martin at the back of the three-car caravan — it’s the best vantage point to observe what’s going on ahead. It’s good that the Audi has been idling for a while, topping up its battery, because Malcolm doesn’t give it much of a warm-up. By the time I’ve left Dovenby Hall’s driveway, the Quattro’s set-square rump has vanished.
The Audi Quattro warbled and bobbed its way almost out of sight. Matthew seems happy to set an interested pace in pursuit – and so the tone is set.
Within a few minutes, we bumble through Cockermouth town centre. Not by accident, I take it. Malcolm winds the Quattro’s electric windows down, shouting and waving hellos to several locals, who all smile when they see him and then smile again at what he’s driving. He’s clearly still something of a much-loved local rock star – despite what M-Sport’s troublesome neighbours, who objected to his building of the site’s motorsport circuit, might think.
Soon after, our route proper has begun. We head south of town, through Brackenthwaite hamlet and then out alongside the broad, imposing flank of Grasmoor and the shore of Crummock Water, as the road begins to wiggle and wind. We pause for some drive-by photos and then press on towards Buttermere village, past the lake and through Gatesgarth.
We’re here in the middle of November, and as we drive through the lakeside woods, the fallen leaves retain their vivid yellows and greens at the very tops of the foot-high piles in which they’re heaped on each side of the road. In the Aston Martin DBX S, I subconsciously hold my breath every time we meet oncoming traffic, and I’m deploying the car’s considerable reserves with due care. Honestly, Wilsons Sr and Jr, out in front, look like they’re having most of the fun, for now. At least I get the bassy V8 soundtrack.
We’re heading to the Honister Pass, and what a sight it is, even on a sodden morning. The rainwater is streaming down the road where it’s steepest, and the landscape looks like something Tolkien might have imagined. Enormous fallen rocks litter the valley as if dropped from the heavens and, at the top of it all, the entrance to an old slate mine – now the Sky Hi Cafe – is marked with stone plinths.
“If this was tourist season, we wouldn’t be here,” explains Matthew, as he gets the coffees in. It gets very busy indeed with cyclists and mountain bikers – Matthew himself is often one of them and the road is narrow and serpentine. It’s definitely worth a visit, though, I’d say, providing you time it well.
While we pause, Malcolm tells the story of coming to collect the slate for the fireplace at the family home in Workington, when he was seven years old. He says: “They told my dad to keep the sliding doors of the van wedged open as we drove down, so we could dive out if the brakes failed!”
A little reluctantly, we convince him to give up the Audi’s driver’s seat. “I had two Quattro road cars when I was driving for Audi Sport in the 80s,” he remembers, “but they weren’t 20-valves like this. They had a lot more turbo lag: the power was very much on or off, and you really had to wait for it. This one is so much better.”
He takes the wheel of the DBX S for our next stretch, Matthew is in the Audi and I take the Toyota GR Yaris. We descend the east side of the Honister towards Seatoller, where the road gets wider and its gradients and radii get a little gentler, allowing quicker progress, then press on through Borrowdale and north along the river Derwent. The view out of the windscreen remains wonderfully epic throughout, with Scafell Pike poking up out of the driver’s side window.
Soon enough it all changes. Keswick’s pretty town centre comes and goes, then we head north past Bassenthwaite and Dodd Wood, turning north-east at the lake’s northernmost corner to head towards Uldale and Caldbeck.
Suddenly this is more like moorland than mountain. The tourist traffic is gone; the road runs straight for longer stretches, well sighted for crest after crest; and there’s very little on it. It’s clearly one of Malcolm’s old test roads, to judge by the way his pace quickens with the evident familiarity. It’s like he knows that the farmer’s trailers and slow-moving MPVs that might be around the next corner are out of the picture today, like he’s arranged it. There are fast, cambered corners and plenty of gradients to keep life interesting. This, he later admits, is also the way he gets across to the M6 to the east, avoiding the densely trafficked A66.
A few blurry miles later we pull into a big gravel roadside car park to swap cars again, then, a few minutes later, we do the same once again to trade impressions. Malcolm is full of admiration for the Aston Martin, particularly how a car so big, heavy and fast is made so benign and easy to handle. He likes the Toyota too, pleased that it’s so clearly such a fun thing to drive – although he doesn’t much like the excess of information and electronic noise with which it bombards its driver. “Who needs to know all that?” he asks.
Both Wilsons are keener still to talk about the Quattro, though. They can’t believe how ‘right’ its performance level feels for the road even today, so long after it was made. Or how sweetly it begins to grip, steer, ride and handle when you put just enough speed into it. Or how alive it feels, relative to the modern cars.
From here it’s a short run back to M-Sport for both Malcolm and Matthew, their afternoons made busier by a few hours spent as unpaid petrolhead tour guides. I sense neither of them much minded the distraction, though.
