I headed to Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire with the Redline magazine team during the week for my first experience of the UK motor industry’s annual one-day test-drive fest for journalists. The ominous weather forecast played out exactly as promised, but still didn’t put a dampener on the day – it just meant you had to dash from car to manufacturer stand to car and back again rather quickly to avoid getting soaked to the skin. Inevitably, I didn’t get around to everything on my ‘to-drive’ list, but still managed to sample a sizeable selection of what was on offer. So without further ado, it’s time to hand out some utterly subjective and arbitrary awards…
Car most suited to the conditions: Subaru WRX STI 320 As mentioned, the torrential rain that piled down on Millbrook for most of the day didn’t spoil things nearly as much as I thought it would, but it did mean driving most of the cars on offer with a mite more caution than would have been the case had the track been bone dry. Not so the new Impr… I mean, WRX STI. Working together, the C.Diff, SI-Drive and symmetrical AWD systems allowed me to stamp on the throttle pretty much wherever I pleased without any hint of unsettling the car. Having not driven the latest Evo X, I’m not in a position to compare the two, but the Mitsubishi would have to be bloody good to beat this.
Car least suited to the conditions: Vauxhall VXR8 Vauxhall’s PR team evidently agreed with this evaluation, as the hairy chested V8 super saloon was restricted to high-speed banking driving only, meaning no-one got to find just how much of a handful it would have been around a soggy hill course. I can, however, report that both the rate of acceleration and the noise it makes are absolutely sublime. Definitely not a car for shy retiring types though – I’d rather have something that’s likely to be less of a police magnet.
Car I most want to do a trackday in: Mugen Honda Civic Type-R This is one of the best hot hatches I’ve driven, if not the best. It has impossibly precise steering and that razor-sharp throttle response I love, but which is proving harder and harder to find these days as small-capacity forced induction slowly takes over. Add to that seats that redefine the word ‘supportive’ and the cacophony of on-cam VTEC and you have a car that I would happily have lapped the hill course in all day. But all good things must of course come to an end, except perhaps the manic grin that gets frozen onto your face after driving one of these. Downsides? It’s not cheap, and your spine would be reduced to jelly after a few weeks driving it on normal roads.
Honourable mention: Porsche Boxster & Porsche Cayman R I’d love to attack a track in either of these cars, but I’d really love to do it with 1970 Le Mans winner Richard Attwood in the passenger seat giving me some pointers. Dickie was one of the Porsche ‘Driving Consultants’ who sat in with anyone having a go on the day, but unfortunately I didn’t find myself next to him when I took first the Boxster and then the Cayman R out for spin. Both cars felt taut, poised and powerful, but the truth is I’m just not an accomplished enough driver to fully exploit a powerful mid-engined car on a twisty, soaking wet test track with little or no run-off area. I was able to get much closer to the limit in the front-wheel-drive Civic, hence why it gets the nod for now.
Most stereotypical car: Renaultsport Mégane 250 Cup for being troublesomely French After two minutes’ driving in the latest Mégane 250, the wipers stopped working. It wasn’t raining too heavily at the time, so I pressed on and finished my run around the hill course. As expected, the Renault was formidably fast, eager and grippy, but with the rain getting heavier I had no choice but to come in. I dropped it back to the Renault stand and informed the staff of the problem. An hour later I walked by and they were still fiddling about with the fuse box. Some things never change…
Honourable mention: Audi RS5 for being uninspiringly German Redline has had a VW Scirocco R on loan for the past week, and while we’ve all been impressed with its devastating effectiveness at getting places really rather quickly indeed, it’s all a bit uneventful and characterless. It was a similar story with the Scirocco’s bigger brother in the VAG stable, the RS5. It offers immensely swift progress in almost any gear and is very sure-footed, but it feels too much like everything has been smothered in cotton wool. Once you get over the novelty of its sheer pace, there’s not a lot else going on to keep you interested. Except perhaps the two best things about the RS5: The upshift noise (a little ‘pohf’ as some unburnt fuel is injected into the exhaust) and the downshift noise (a deliciously aggressive growl). End result: Test drive was punctuated with utterly needless changing up and down from second to third and back again, accompanied by demented laughter every time.
Most pleasantly surprising car: Peugeot 508 SW GT 200 HDi If you had sat me in this car and covered up the badge on the steering wheel, I would never have guessed it was a Gallic product. The interior of the new 508 is extremely impressive, with a genuine premium feel to rival the best Germany has to offer. The 508 is also a very handsome design outside, especially compared to the gawky 407 it has replaced, and the 200bhp oil-burning unit is a typically frugal yet torquey modern diesel, enhanced further on this car by a slick semi-auto gearbox. Ride comfort is excellent, the seats are superbly supportive and the handling is solid, if not show-stopping. I would hazard a guess that the even more miserly ‘e-HDi’ 112bhp model would probably feel a little underpowered, but in 200bhp form, the 508 has to be considered a frontrunner in the family segment right now.
Most disappointing car: Alfa Romeo Giulietta Cloverleaf 1750 Tbi While this car is definitely a massive step up for Alfa in terms of quality and general ‘solidity’ from the likes of the 159 (which I also got behind the wheel of yesterday), I just didn’t warm to the Giulietta at all. The big, chunky pedals are awkward and spaced too close together, there are some odd plastic panels on the steering wheel where your thumbs usually rest, and it commits the cardinal sin of not having a footrest next to the clutch. In fact, it doesn’t even have any space next to the clutch at all, so your foot has to hover awkwardly over it all the time – not too bad when attacking a switchback mountain road, I suppose, but it would be damned annoying in urban/suburban driving. And, while the Cloverleaf is not exactly a slouch, it doesn’t feel nearly as quick as its 235bhp would suggest. Disappointing, as I really wanted to like it.
Honourable Mention: Mazda MX-5 2.0i Sport Tech As the owner of a tatty but trusty Mk1 example of Mazda’s iconic roadster, I’m a committed member of the cult of Jinba Ittai (how sad does that sound?) But the latest iteration didn’t impress me. It’s a five-year-old design now, and the cabin feels quite dated and low-rent compared to the opposition. Packing a 2.0-litre engine these days, it’s obviously quicker than my Mk1, but the MX-5 was never about pure speed, and the all-important handling and feedback feel somewhat dulled compared to the raw, analogue thrills of the earlier car. This is still a good driver’s car in its own right, but it has lost something compared to its predecessors.
Cars I drove that didn’t fit into a snappy category: Skoda Fabia vRS and VW Polo GTI Keen to stay on top of the hot hatch market, I sampled both Skoda’s Fabia vRS and the new VW Polo GTI. The current model of the Czech supermini is based on VAG’s PQ24 platform, whereas the equivalent VW uses the more recent PQ25 development of this chassis. Despite this, I found the Skoda to be the more pleasing companion around the hill course. It’s not any faster than you’d expect it to be, but does handle very sweetly and the DSG box, as always, works well. The Polo I found to be a bit more of a handful as I understeered, torque-steered
and wheelspun my way around the track. The weather conditions and my admittedly modest driving talents may have had something to do with that, but it’s hard not to get the impression that VW has given the Polo slightly more power than it can properly handle. One thing I noticed about both cars is how little support their ‘sports seats’ seem to give when you’ve just stepped out of a full-on supercar bucket seat.
Funniest moment of the day: Passengering in a Rolls-Royce Phantom around the hill course They say a Rolls-Royce is a car for your chauffer to drive, and a Bentley is the one you drive yourself. Pity the poor chauffers who have to heft this beast around, so. Let’s be fair, though – the hill course is the last place on Earth this car was designed for, and you can’t help but marvel at just how far beyond the conventional definition of ‘luxury’ car the big Phantom goes. But the lumpen, wallowly ride around Millbrooks’s twists and turns had me and my colleagues in stitches, and had I been behind the wheel myself, I’d likely have crashed it from laughing too hard.
Honourable mention: Driving the immaculate, 30,000-mile 1988 Ibiza that SEAT brought along After a day spent driving the latest and greatest the motor industry had to offer, it was quite an education to get behind the wheel of this 1988-vintage Ibiza, one of the last SEATs designed before the full integration with the Volkswagen Group. It’s not completely bereft of German influence however: both Karmann and Porsche were involved in its development. As I wrestled with the non-assisted steering around Millbrook’s city route, the Ibiza’s spartan cabin reminded me most of a 750cc Fiat Panda I had the use of for a couple of months when first learning to drive. With a steering wheel set somewhere between the usual car and bus angles, bizarrely quirky wiper and indicator controls (not stalks, but sliding switches), and a juddery, imprecise gearbox, it really served to illuminate just how awful everyman motoring was a little over 20 years ago. But I’d be lying if I said that manhandling it around the city course wasn’t at least mildly amusing, and there is something appealing about its utterly unpretentious, boxy styling, both inside and out. It looks almost clean and minimalist next to the amorphous blobs that most superminis and small family cars have grown into these days. And one final oddity: it was still being produced in the 21st century under license in China as the ‘Nanjing Yuejin Soyat.’ Stick that in your automotive pub quiz knowledge bank…
Car of the day: Jaguar XJ Supersport 5.0-litre V8 Supercharged I’m struggling to find words here. This thing is bigger than my house but feels lighter than my MX-5. Its interior manages to be both sumptuously luxurious and mind-bogglingly futuristic – there are no physical dials, just a beguiling animated display screen that slightly brightens the area of the speedometer/tachometer that you’re currently passing over. Even with the traction control turned on, it demands respect and quick reflexes when being driven hard. It barks like a demented wolfhound when you downshift or stamp on the loud pedal. And yet, once you’ve finished thrashing it around some B-roads like a hot hatch and deafening yourself with supercharged V8 howl, you can shift up to sixth and glide home smoothly and serenely on the motorway at Warp 5 in an environment quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Utterly astonishing. I want one, now.
Honourable Mention: Audi R8 Spyder 4.2 FSI Quattro Audi’s piece de resistance was high on my to-do list for the day, and it delivered in spades, giving me bags of Quattro-inspired confidence on the hill course, even when the rain was sheeting down. It looks stunning in red, makes a glorious noise and is an absolute rocket on almost any type of road. But I was expecting all that to be the case – it fulfilled my expectations, but didn’t exceed them. One minor niggle: this manual-gearbox example had a clinky metal gear gate. I hate clinky metal gear gates.
And now, the ones that got away…
1. Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG This was a strange one. As you would expect, demand was high, and the Mercedes PR girl had a list as long as her arm of people booked to drive the firm’s latest supercar, yet no-one seemed to have heard of anyone who actually got to drive it. I felt better about missing out on the way home when I found out a Mercedes chaperone occupied the passenger seat all day.
2. BMW M3 GTS and BMW 1M BMW weren’t booking specific times to drive their two orange hellraisers, so every time I passed by the stand, there was inevitably a queue of three or four waiting their turn. Not wanting to pass up on 30-40 minutes of potential driving time, I ended up giving them a miss.
3. Citroen DS3 Racing Affordable hot hatches like this are core to the Redline target market, so it was put down as a definite must-drive at the start of the day. Sadly, as I crested a rise on the hill course in the Peugeot 508 SW late in the afternoon, the little black-and-orange Citroen came into view, beached and looking decidedly secondhand after an altercation with the armco and/or a muddy bank. The unfortunate driver sat in the front, head in hands. Fortunately no-one was hurt, and it served as a timely reminder for me to continue driving within my limits, as I had done up to that point.
4. The Bentleys – all of them The aforementioned Citroen incident closed the hill course for about 20 minutes, which unfortunately coincided with the time I had booked to drive one of the sizeable Bentley fleet present on the day. But with an appointment chez Porsche scheduled immediately afterwards, I had no choice but to pass it over.
5. Er, photos You may have noticed this post is illustrated entirely with SMMT and manufacturer press photos. My surprisingly capable 12MP camera phone stayed on my person all day, but the combination of atrocious weather (leaving many of the cars in a right filthy state) and a very hectic schedule (I didn’t even make time for lunch) meant I pressed the shutter precisely zero times during the day. Maybe next year!
