Breezy RIDER
IN September last year I waxed poetic about the performance and handling of the 2.0 litre version of this car. It’s a sublime drive, with oodles of torque and finesse and I was impressed. So much so that I thought that they would struggle to better it with the new Golf GTi. In my view, the Scirocco was a superior car. Admittedly, the GTi drive route was peppered with jammed traffic, roadworks et al but still.
And now here I am in the 1.4 litre Scirocco, with the double-whammy of turbo and super charger on board. I heard it before I saw it and assumed there had been a mix up at the press garage. Unlikely, I thought, but it sounds so sonorous and deep that I suspected it to be the 2.0 litre back again. Wrong.
Jump forward and I’ve now had the car for a few days. It wasn’t long before I found myself wondering why anybody would buy the 2.0 litre when the 1.4 offers almost the same performance. Well, that’s how it feels.
WILLING AND ABLE
Obviously the figures say otherwise. There’s a difference of 49bhp for a start but it’s so willing and able you’d have to question forking out the extra two grand for the bigger engine.
The adaptive chassis control works just as well on this as the 2.0 litre, with the option of selecting Sport, Comfort or Normal. I spent most of my time in Normal mode but I didn’t find it too stiff in Sport, firming up the damping as it does.
There’s something about the Scirocco that instills a certain driving passion in you. You wouldn’t buy this car if you just wanted to get from A to B. Well you could, but there’s plenty of choice about how to perform that task. You can’t help but get involved, you want to use the slick gearshift and the tidy cornering that this car offers in spade-loads. It’s dynamic and will bring the same out in anybody behind the wheel. It’s also comfortable but not so much that the sportiness is lost. There’s also an exceptional amount of grip across a range of surfaces.
On the downside? Rear visibility isn’t the best, given the small rear window but also the B pillars – those which separate the rear windows from the tailgate – block out nasty low-lying car park bollards, meaning that parking sensors are worth considering.
OPTIONS LIST
While on the subject of the options list, the touch-screen DVD navigation system known as RNS 510 is superb but will lighten the pocket by £1,200. Why bother, when you could hop on the web and purchase a mobile sat nav from Sirius, whose brilliant Snooper costs considerably less?
I’ve driven some very proficient cars this year and the Scirocco is right up there with the best of them. It’s going to be cheap to maintain too, cheaper than the Golf GTi and considerably so in this form.
The argument would be that there is more room for passengers in the Golf and the Scirocco is a two-door coupe, where four doors makes life much easier. This 1.4 makes so much sense though, not least financially.
THE FACTS:
VOLKSWAGEN SCIROCCO
1.4tsi 6-speed manual
PRICE: £19,110
0-62MPH: 8 secs
TOP SPEED: 135mph
CO2 G/KM: 154 g/km
MPG COMBINED: 42.8