grotesk

Low profile tyres are a pain (easy to damage rim), but you're probably better at parking than me! Had a stone through the air/con matrix which was expensive (grille and front bumper all one unit) Water pump and cam belt done last year - no other problems. Nice car.

I'm pretty sure that it's all one piece; I had to have the a/c condenser changed due to stone damage and I believe they took the whole thing off. I was then going to put a bit of mesh behind to stop further stone attacks but it just doesn't seem possible to get in there.There's a video somewhere of a Russian doing this in a field with a chainsaw (sorry, I exaggerate, but his approach is a bit rough and ready) that's quite enough to stop you having a go! Not a good design to my mind.

Yes, that's right, the grunt's there ok but you don't feel it so much with the bigger car. I think that those older diesel really did have something (or rather didn't have all the pollution control gear) Good luck. You're right about a Fabia 3 VRS, it'd be great, but I think that VAG decided that SEAT was going to be their sporty little number. Shame!

We had a Mk1 Fabia VRS and now have a Mk3 Octavia VRS Estate and they're a very different style of car. The Octavia's fast but it's big so it doesn't have the lovely whizz bang point-and-shoot feel of the Fabia. On the other had you can do 600 miles in a day and not feel too wrung out, and that with a vast amount of stuff in the back, so depends on what you want to use it for. I used the Fabia for my 60 mile each way commute for a bit but it wasn't really made for that (bit too hard on the bum) and I went back to the Mk1 Octavia we had at the time. They're both nice cars though!

I bought gap insurance for a Yeti (don't know quite why because I never buy these extras). A tree fell down on it two months after the insurance expired. Never again...

Picked up a 2014 VRS Combi this morning, 6000 miles only, our seventh Skoda. Similar spec to yours and it's a really lovely car, bit more perky than the Yeti it replaces and lots of toys for those long winter evenings stuck in the traffic. Have fun!