The First One!

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:23:01 +0200

Hello and welcome to my first blog.

A few of my thoughts regarding my favourite subject, motor cars.

So in this first blog I will discuss one of my favourite cars, the Peugeot 205 GTI.

If you have never driven one, you should, there is nothing else that can come close to the driving experience, it really does feel that you are at one with the vehicle, I like to describe cars like this as 'Cars that talk to you' I don't mean this in an early Maestro way 'drivers door is ajar!' (please say this in a kind of dalekish early 80's speech synthesiser type way) I mean that from the drivers seat you can tell what every wheel is doing, how much it is gripping, or not, the throttle becomes as important as the steering wheel at making the car point the way you want. Roundabouts become fun! It almost makes you want to sell your house and move to Milton Keynes! But, and this is a big but, to drive one fast you must be as focused as the car is, read the road ahead, if you relax for an instant, find you are going into a corner you don't know very well a bit too fast, your immediate reaction is to lift your foot from the throttle, this is when the buttock clenching moment happens, the rear of the car becomes light and the rear wheels lose grip, then you will discover the true meaning of the phrase 'lift off oversteer'. lift off oversteer is, don't get me wrong, fun, as anyone who has driven a classic mini will confirm, the only problem is when you are not planning for it to happen it becomes quite scary, this is the 205 GTI in the above scenario. You will always catch it! (or in the few occasions it has happened to me I have) but you get the feeling that you only just caught it, your heartbeat increases considerably and you then drive to your destination about 20mph slower than you would have done, thinking that you must have an angel watching over you and that it was only divine intervention that has stopped you becoming -sorry for the cliché- 'part of the scenery'.

When the 205GTI was current it's main rival was the Golf GTi Mk2, on paper the cars were very similar, I like to think that in the 80's the driver in the 205 was smiling a bit more often than the driver of the Golf. Of course the Golf driver actually did more driving as his vehicle did not spend as many hours in the dealers workshop having niggly faults rectified, the Golf driver did not have to face the daily task of finding a piece of trim hanging off, and every time the Golf driver slammed his door he did not have to pick up the badge from the rear quarter panel which would fall off until the time that it was stuck on with trim tape or glued into place.

So you may be wondering what is so good about this dangerous and unreliable vehicle.
In my opinion the good points, of which unfortunately are few outweigh the good points by a large margin, if you want a car that is so focused that you become part of it when driving quickly then the 205 GTI is for you, the faults are not important when you have a lovely twisty road in front of you, the only thing that is important is to be as focused as the car itself, it rewards that, and it punishes complacency, often harshly!

I hope you have enjoyed my first blog, please let me know if you enjoyed reading it, and also let me know if you didn't and why.

Neil

Comments

Motorcars

The First One!