The Top Gear World Cup Of Cars 2018

Do a World Cup of Cars, they said. Everyone loves a tenuous World Cup feature! It’ll be topical and fun and highly shareable! After all, Packaging Europe has done a World Cup of Packaging! You don’t want to be shown up by Packaging Europe.

Sure, we said. World Cup of Cars. Easy. Find out how many countries are playing in the World Cup – four? Maybe eight at a push? – then choose a nice car from each of those countries, job done. How hard could it be?

Really hard, as it transpired. Turns out there are many, many countries in this year’s World Cup – like, more countries than we thought there were in the world – many without what you’d call a significant home-grown car industry. Honestly, it’s almost as if some of these countries weren’t thinking of spurious World Cup-related clickbait when they were considering the validity of establishing local automotive ventures.

So here, presented with all due apologies to the nations involved, is Top Gear’s World Cup of Cars 2018. Feel free to add your own, far better suggestions in the commentsy bit below.

Russia boasts a burgeoning international car industry nowadays, with modern factories building state-of-the-art vehicles in partnership with firms from around the world. Those square-edged, Soviet-era clunkers are relics of a distant past, an easy go-to only for feckless journalists desperately trying to finish a dubious listicle to a tight deadline.

So, to represent Russia, we’ve gone with… a Vaz-2101! No, the Soviet-era clunker – based on the Fiat 124, and known around the world as a Lada – may not be not be flashy, but it’s dependable. Just like, um, whichever member of the Russia World Cup squad could be legitimately described as unflashy yet dependable. We’re going… Vladamir Granat. He sounds like he means business.

Based, it’s said, on the bones of the old long-wheelbase Mercedes G-Class, the minty-hued Gazal-1 is Saudi Arabia’s first, and to date only, home-designed, home-built offering.

A 380bhp, 5.5-litre Mercedes V8 should give the big lad a decent turn of pace when clear on goal. Top Gear foresees this cars-as-footballers analogy becoming quite painful quite quickly.

When Top Gear Googled ‘Egyptian cars’, we made a fractional typo and ended up Googling ‘Egyptian cats’. Turns out Egyptian cats are an actual thing. Funny pointy ears, supercilious expression, yeah we realise this describes all cats not just Egyptian ones, but point is, Egyptian cats, loads of them.

But Egyptian cars, slimmer pickings. We’ve gone for the Ramses, the masterpiece billed as ‘Egypt’s first car’, built in the very shadow of the pyramids in the late 1950s. Because more cars should really be named after Pharoahs.

What do you mean, you had no idea there was a Uruguayan manufacturer? Of course there’s a Uruguayan manufacturer. It is called Effa, and it makes… well, we’re not completely certain quite what, but we’re pretty sure that (a) they’re mostly based on Chinese designs, and (b) no one outside Uruguay has ever had a particular desire to own one.

Nonetheless, Effa it is, and why not the Effa Ideal, the Bertone-designed (really!) city car developed jointly between Changhe and Suzuki? Luis Suarez, your new wheels await.

Portugal. A land of sun, sea, surf, and surprisingly stodgy homebuilt cars. If you’re looking for a genuinely local Portuguese car, the shopping list is a short one. Luckily it’s a shopping list that includes the magnificent UMM 4x4, the perfect car for anyone who’s ever wanted a Land Rover Defender with the aesthetics of a particularly crestfallen Bassett Hound.

UMM stands for União Metalo-Mecânica, a Lisbon-based metal-working factory that, in 1977, assumed the rights to build the French-designed 4x4 Cournil, with spectacular results. UMM doesn’t make cars any more. This seems a shame. Cristiano Ronaldo would rock this look.

Spain should, of course, be represented by a Seat. No longer the black sheep of the great VW family, Seat is a success story nowadays, making fine, class-leading cars. Popular, too: the Leon and Ibiza are the best-selling cars in Spain. It would be frankly remiss not to make Spain’s entry a Seat of some kind.

So we’ve gone for a Tramontana XTR. Because it’s got a tuned Mercedes V12 making nearly 900bhp, and a huge hinging canopy, and gold bits, and frankly however good the new Seat Arona might be, you’re not going to find Sergio Ramos driving one.

Having neither seen one in the metal nor ever driven one, Top Gear cannot confirm for certain that the Laraki Epitome – a 1200bhp, twin-turbo V8-powered mid-engined supercar – actually exists in buyable, driveable form.

But Laraki, a two-decade-old car company based in Casablanca, which is in Morocco, seems pretty convinced the Epitome exists, so who are we to doubt? After all, Top Gear has never seen in metal, nor ever driven, the Moroccan national football team, but we are happy to accept their existence without dispute. This is a level of existential deconstruction you just don’t get with Richard Keys and Andy Gray.

It was known as ‘the Iranian chariot’. First built in 1967, and based on the Hillman Hunter, which wasn’t even a particularly advanced car in 1967, the Paykan somehow survived for nearly 40 years. By the turn of the century it was estimated that some 40 per cent of Iranians drove a Paykan.

Though finally being euthanized in 2005 in the name of progress, environmental concern and, one suspects, pity for the poor old thing, the Paykan remains the archetypal Iranian car. It’ll be a shock if it makes it out the group stages, Gary.

‘You never know what to expect from France,’ opines Top Gear’s in-house person-who-knows-about-football. Les Bleus, it seems, are somewhat flittish when it comes to delivering the goods in major international tournaments. (Unlike England, of course, who are the very model of consistent disappointment.)

Thus, to reflect the mercurial tendencies of the French, Top Gear nominates the new Alpine A110, a lightweight two-seater that bucks the trend towards ever more power and ever fatter tyres. And, as Chris Harris discovered, one that’s capable of throwing up an unexpected surprise or two of its own.

Australia really likes pick-ups. Last year, the two best-selling cars in Australia weren’t cars at all, but pick-ups, specifically the Toyota Hilux and Ford Ranger.

But to make its mark on the international stage, Australia needs something with a little more oomph. Enter the 577bhp Holden GTS Maloo. Sure, Holden may have ceased production last year – a move sadly spelling the end of any Australian auto manufacture – but you can’t get more Aussie than a supercharged, V8, rear-drive ute that’ll turn those sheep on the flatbed into shepherd’s pie at the first sign of a corner.

According to our extensive research, Peru is a country in South America with a population of 32 million people and a diverse climate ranging from equatorial to cold desert.

It is also a country where the most exciting fact about cars is that quite a lot of people drive a Toyota Yaris.

We very much wanted Denmark to be represented by the Thrige, an automobile built in Odense between 1911 and 1917. We wanted this solely as an excuse to write the word ‘Thrige’, which is a lovely word.

But with pictures of the Thrige surprisingly scarce on the ground, we had to settle instead for a Zenvo. Not the scorching old ST1, but the new TSR-S, the one with the crazy tilting ‘centripetal’ wing. There’s a football joke about tricky wingers here but frankly we’re all far past that point.

Argentina has a long-established automotive industry, its factories building home-focused versions of Chevrolets, Hondas, Fords, Mercs, Renaults, Fords and more. But what’s the fun in choosing one of those when we could show you instead the IAME Justicialista, a slice of sadly forgotten magnificence that entirely failed to kick-start a local Argentinian car industry in the 1950s?

Justicialista. Forget ‘Ioniq’ and ‘Panamera, THAT is a proper car name. You don’t mess with Justicialista. If Top Gear ever moves to Argentina to pursue a career as a superhero, that’s our name sorted. Justicialista.

Though there was a standard Justicialista, with a two-cylinder, 36bhp, two-stroke engine driving the front wheels, the one you wanted was the two-seater, with an air-cooled flat-four sourced from Porsche. Just picture it. Lionel Messi, Jules Rimet trophy clutched in hand, cruising through the Buenos Aires victory parade in one of these. That’s how to crown a career.

Iceland doesn’t have much of a homegrown car industry, on account of it being a rock (albeit a very beautiful rock) in the north Atlantic with a population the size of Bradford. Perhaps improbably, the Toyota Yaris sells well in Iceland. As does the Skoda Octavia. And the Hyundai Getz. But we can do better than that.

Thus, representing Iceland… an Arctic Trucks-modified Toyota Hilux! Entirely capable of traversing Iceland’s wild, volcanic terrain. Or putting in a well-timed reducer on Christian Eriksen.

Tough one, this. On the one hand, Croatia has strong history of building trucks and buses. Good, strong, sturdy trucks and buses. The sort of vehicles you’d want on your side when confronted with a phalanx of tricksy-footed Brazilians.

On the other hand, Croatia also makes the Rimac C_Two. A 1900 horsepower electric monster that’ll do, its makers say, 0-60mph in under two seconds. And 258mph flat out. And looks like… well, rather like that picture you’re looking at right now. So if it’s OK with you, Croatia, we’ll stick you down for the Rimac. All good?

Clearly only one choice of maker here: Innoson Vehicle Manufacture, the Nnewi-based enterprise that bills itself as ‘Africa’s 1st Indigenous Car Manufacturer’. The only question is, which of IVM’s offerings should represent its home country? Should it be the IVM Fox (slogan: ‘Putting Africa on the wheels’), the IVM Umu (‘Finally the wheels of Africa’) or the G5 (‘Driving Africa Forward’)?

Well, we’re going for the Carrier 4x4. Partly because pick-up trucks are great, but also because its design features include – and we quote from the Innoson website here – a 1.68 metre load bay that ‘enables more capacity and load more articles’. And let’s be honest, if you’re not thinking of loading more articles by this stage of the feature, you really should be.

Can you believe Brazil is still building the humble VW Type 2, the original surf bus first seen way back in 1957? No, neither can we, because they actually stopped building it back in 2013. Even so, a solid innings, and it’s our nomination for Brazil’s World Cup Of Cars representative.

After all, what object better encapsulates the laid-back Brazilian lifestyle - beach football, pina colada at sundown, funky samba beats – than the original hippie bus? OK, quite a lot of other objects, in truth, but how many of those objects are cars? None of them, that’s how many.

Did you know that, in Switzerland, it’s illegal to wear a watch showing the wrong time? That’s not actually true, but the important thing is, it could be. Point is, the Swiss are a sensible, restrained, punctual lot.

Apart from Rinspeed. Rinspeed are off their bloody rockers. And things don’t get much more off-rocker than the Oasis, a concept car described as a ‘garden plot on wheels for the urban jungle’. Well, it should liven up a dead rubber at the tail end of the group stages.

In the 1970s, Costa Rica had its own, locally built car. It was called the Amigo, and looked a little like an old Toyota J40 Land Cruiser designed by someone who had never seen an old Toyota J40 Land Cruiser.

The Amigo was the brainchild of General Motors, who stated it was ‘the moral obligation of industrialised societies to help the less industrialised society get started on the way to a higher standard of living’. Top Gear suspects there may also be a moral obligation never to foist anything so awful as the Amigo on an innocent population.

Costa Rica, though. Lovely place. Hope they do well in the World Cup.

If Top Gear was a more sceptical publication, it might suggest that the Aqos Javier – a 500bhp, V10-engine two-seater – is unlikely ever to challenge the Porsche 911 for global sports car domination.

But hey, it’s World Cup season, a time where optimism and blind hope trumps any rational calculation of outcome. So good luck to you Serbia. With the Javier, and, y’know, the football thing.

Over the decades, Germany has made many, many extraordinary cars. Some of the greatest sports cars in history. It would be only fair of us to allow Germany to be represented by, say, the Porsche 911 GT2 RS. Or the Merc 300SL. Or the Audi Sport Quattro.

But hey, it’s Germany. They win everything, all the time, and frankly Top Gear feels it is time to level the playing field. Therefore Germany is to be hobbled with the BMW X6M, perhaps the most pointless and offensive SUV-coupe-thing in the mercifully short history of SUV-coupe-things. Annoyingly will still turn out to take a better penalty than Eric Dier. Despite being a car.

Top Gear likes Mexico, and it likes the Mastretta MXT. Sure, the orangey two-seater may not have revolutionised the sports car world in quite the way its owners might have hoped when it launched a decade ago. Sure, recent reports suggest the Mastretta brothers have walked away from the company they founded. Sure, the Mastretta website might currently feature quite a lot of blank space where pictures of cars really ought to be.

But that’s fine, and definitely not something to poke fun at. Love you, Mexico. Love your car. Best of luck in Russia.

If you’re looking for the finest example of Swedish minimalist, chilled design, you might be better served with the new Volvo V90. Or a classic Saab 99. But Top Gear has a soft spot for Sweden, and suspects it’ll need every help it can get to escape a group containing the indestructible Germans. So go on, the Swedes. Have yourself a 278mph Koenigsegg! Get stuck in! Fill yer boots! Other generic footballing encouragements!

For a country that makes so very many cars nowadays, it’s almost interesting how un-interesting most South Korean cars have been over the years.

But that fascinating dullness is starting to change, particularly in the shape of the new Hyundai i30N hot hatch and Kia Stinger GT. But which of the two to choose? Well, as you’ll have guessed from the picture above, and the words above, we’ve gone for the Kia Stinger GT. Partly because it’s more powerful, partly because it’ll do big skids, but mostly because it’s called the Stinger.

No question the finest sports car named after an item of sleeveless menswear, the lightweight Gillet Vertigo is the most exciting thing to come out of Belgium since Eden Hazard*.

*A footballer renowned for his entertaining and skilful antics on the field, apparently.

Unless they’re keeping it very much on the downlow, not a whole lot going on in the way of local car industry in Panama. Best selling cars? A mix of entirely forgettable Hyundais, Nissans and Toyotas.

Therefore it falls upon Top Gear to selflessly nominate a suitable candidate to represent Panama. And we’re thinking, what’s Panama most famous for? Canals. And also natty hats. And what’s the ideal vehicle to drive up a canal, while wearing a natty hat? That’s right, Top Gear’s homebuilt object of luxury, the Ssangyacht! You’re welcome, Panama.

For those, like Top Gear, who worry the world of cars is becoming increasingly, dangerously homogenised, may we present the antidote. The Wallyscar Isiz.

Yes, Tunisia has a proudly Tunisian manufacturer. Yes, it is called Wallyscar. Yes, it makes (or, at least, once made) a faintly extraordinary 4x4 concoction called the Isiz. These are all discoveries that make Top Gear so very happy that it almost doesn’t regret agreeing to do this whole World Cup Of Cars feature in the first place.

Isiz features include, and we quote, ‘a turning circle of 9.2 metres’ and ‘two Euro NCAP stars’. Frankly Top Gear cannot think what else one might need from a new car.

England! England! What magnificent cars she has given us through the years. The Bentley Speed Six! The Jaguar E-Type! The Aston DB5! The McLaren F1! Why, it’s enough to have Top Gear hoisting the office bulldog to the top of the office flagpole just thinking about it.

So, faced with so many glorious options, we’ve opted for… the Morgan 3Wheeler. Because, with the chances of England making a genuine dent on the World Cup currently occupying the snowball-Hades end of the odds chart, we might as well go for what we’re good at: giving the rest of the world something curious to look at while asking, “So it’s still basically the 1930s over there, huh?”

Powered by, yes, a Corvette V8 and aiming to offer a cheaper way into GT3 racing, the complicated-to-write Arrinera Hussarya was apparently developed with the help of Lee Noble, he of Noble M600 fame.

But depite the Brit connection and Yank engine, the Arrinera is proudly Polish. Just like [TG frantically Googles ‘Polish footballers at 2018 World Cup’] Jakub Blaszczykowski. And Artur Jedrzejczyk. We’re just going to throw it out there, the Poles may have too many letters at their disposal.

We’ll be honest. With all respect to Senegal, we were struggling a bit here. Slight absence of car-building going on down Senegal way.

But then it struck us. What’s the capital city of Senegal? Dakar! What famous rally ends in Dakar? Not the Paris-Dakar rally because that’s been held in South America since 2009! What famous rally USED to end in Dakar before it moved to South America in 2009? That’s right, the Paris-Dakar rally!

Accordingly, Senegal gets unquestionably the coolest Dakar racer of them all, the 1986 Porsche 959. You’re welcome, Senegal. We’re expecting big things.

Such a shame, isn’t it, that Italy didn’t qualify for the 2018 World Cup? Nothing to do with the football, but just think of all those wonderful Italian cars you could be looking at right now. The Ferrari… anything. The Lamborghini… anything.

But Italy didn’t qualify for the World Cup. Colombia qualified for the World Cup. Not at the expense of Italy, we know. And we’re sure they did it with great verve and elan, and shall light up the tournament with their silky South American skills. But from a car point of view, we’ll be honest, Colombia’s just not packing the same sort of storied history as Italy. Or Germany. Or in fact any country with a recognisable homegrown car industry.

But on the plus side, it appears the Colombians are rather fond of the Dacia Duster. Or the Renault Duster, as it’s badged over there. As are we, so we’ll put them down for one of those.

Well, it’s nice to end on a high. Japan’s record in the “official” World Cup may not be stellar – their best result, apparently, being a ninth place finish in 2002 and 2010 – but in the far more important Top Gear World Cup Of Cars, it’s a veritable giant.

And because no day on the internet cannot be improved with a picture of the original Honda NSX – Ayrton Senna, real-world Ferrari beater, screaming VTEC etc etc – here’s a picture of the original Honda NSX. Back of the net, Brian.