What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Good doggy – let’s give the bark plugs a workout ^{Suzuki Swift Sport 1.6}

Over the years I have watched several hundred games of car football. It’s a staple ingredient of the Top Gear Live show and is much like normal football, except in every single detail. There are, for instance, three players on either side, and each of them is in a car. The ball is 4 foot across. There are no goalkeepers and the game lasts until James May’s team has lost.

We have used many types of car, and, as a result, I’m in the unique position of being able to say what’s best if you want to go down to the park this morning for a drive-about with your son and his mates. I recognize this is a fairly limited sliver of the market, but I try to cater for everyone, so here goes. The Reliant Robin is hopeless. While the engine and in particular the gearbox are strong, it has a habit of falling over every time you try to cut inside an opposing player. Or track back. Or shoot. Or defend. Or do anything, really.

The Smart Fortwo is even worse. This also has a habit of falling over and, to complicate matters, the gearbox doesn’t allow you to switch from first to reverse quickly enough. Sometimes all six players can be stationary, as they wait for the car’s brain to allow the transmission to shift. This makes for a boring spectacle.

The Toyota Aygo is much better, as is the Austin Landcrab, but the best of the lot is the old Suzuki Swift. It’s small, nimble and tough. The only real problem is the windscreen washer bottle, which is located just behind the front bumper, where it is easily damaged.

And it’s not just car football in which that little car scored well. It was also extremely good at ice hockey. I know this because, when we filmed the Top Gear Winter Olympics show some years ago, we used Swifts in the rink and they were epic, whizzing hither and thither in a blizzard of snow, with cheeky exhaust noises and panache.

The Swift is a rare thing – one of only a trio of cars that all three of us on Top Gear like. The others, in case you’re interested, are the Ford Mondeo and the Subaru Legacy Outback. I liked the Swift so much that when I reviewed it on these pages back in 2006 I toyed seriously with giving it five stars. It was as good as a Mini Cooper, I reckoned, but it cost a lot less.

Well, now there’s a new model. It’s noticeably bigger than before, which means it’ll be less manoeuvrable on the football pitch and more exposed as well. It also means it’ll be harder to park in a town. That would be a price worth paying if the extra length and width translated into more cabin space. It doesn’t. The rear seats are very cramped and the boot is almost amusingly small.

Happily, however, the extra size doesn’t seem to have affected the weight very badly. This is an unbelievably light car, which is good for fuel economy and good for speed. Very good, actually. I’ve done some checking and it has a similar power-to-weight ratio to that of the old Peugeot 205 GTI. And that’s a vital comparison…

I miss the old Peugeot and all of the other hot hatchbacks from the Eighties. There was a time when 12 per cent of all Ford Escorts sold in Britain were hotted-up XR3s and you couldn’t park in Fulham because every street was rammed with Lhasa green Volkswagen Golf GTIs. Every car maker made a hot hatchback then because we all wanted one.

Today everyone seems to have forgotten the recipe. The current Golf GTI is a lovely thing to drive, but all the telltale styling details that set the original apart from the standard models are gone. Take away the badge and the car now looks almost identical to the diesel.

Ford has gone the other way. Its hot Focuses look as though they’ve crashed into a motorists’ discount shop and every single thing in there has become attached. Spoilers, vivid brake callipers, scoops, vents. They’re vajazzles with wheels.

Then you have Renault. It does an excellent range of hot hatches but they’re all stripped out – racy, knowing. They seem to be saying that if you buy one, you are interested only in high-g cornering, and that was never the point of a hot hatch.

They were supposed to do everything. They were fast when you wanted them to be and restrained when you didn’t. They were supposed to stand out from the crowd but only if you were concentrating. And they were supposed to be cheap. Which counts out the Citroën DS3. And the Mini. And the forthcoming Audi A1 quattro.

The car makers would probably argue that there’s no point making a crash-’em-and-bash-’em hot hatch these days because people are more interested in space and style and they all want a Range Rover Evoque. But the only reason we all want an Evoque is that you aren’t making a thrill-a-minute, bung-it-into-a-parking-space and put-the-dog-in-the-back hot hatches any more.

Which brings me back to the Swift Sport. The twin-cam 1.6-litre engine is a little gem. It has a variable intake system and variable valve timing, so although it’s small, it’s nicely techie. Starting it – with a button these days rather than a key – is like poking a small dog with a stick. Immediately, it’s keen to be off, jumping up and down and making excited whimpering noises.

To keep that feeling alive, the gearing is incredibly short. Think west highland terrier rather than alsatian, or even spaniel. This means the motor is always on the boil, always at peak revs and therefore always ready to go. From standstill to 62 mph takes 8.7 seconds. Pretty much exactly how long it took a 1.6-litre 205 GTI, incidentally.

But there is a bit of a drawback here. In sixth, at 85 mph, it’s doing 3000 rpm, which makes it noisy. Very noisy. I’m tempted to say too noisy. It gave me a headache.

The upside comes, though, when you get off the motorway, because, wahey, this is a car that takes you back to the mid-Eighties. It feels eager and crisp, so it turns even the most dreary journey to buy milk into a fun-filled extravaganza of puppy-dog enthusiasm, squealy tyres and grinning.

It’s not that fast, but this, remember, is a £13,499 car. To my mind, Suzuki has got the blend between cheap and cheerful exactly right.

The styling recipe is bang-on as well. The alloy wheels are just the right design and size, and it has two exhausts – on either side of the car.

Inside, the seats are buckety without being stupid, and you get exactly the right level of equipment – cruise control, air-conditioning, USB connectivity and seven airbags. There’s also a good radio.

The new car has had rave reviews from all the motoring magazines and specialist writers, and it’s got one from me, too. It’s noisy and the boot is microscopic. But other than these things, it’s brilliant and almost certainly the best small car on the market today.