Number 2 for the Fabia vRS!!

Clarkson's Normal Nine - Times Online

That's funny - I had a dream about him testing out my modded vRS the other night (!!!!). If he ever comes to Bahrain he's more than welcome.....

I remember reading his review when it first came out. Pity he wasn't quite so complimentary about it when Top Gear did their head-to-head with the MINI Cooper (NB: he didn't slate it, he just didn't seem as enthusiastic about it as his Times review would suggest!)

I also remember it coming 8th in Autocar's(?) 2004 top 10 of performance cars, ahead of the DB9 and the ZT V8. Mine's got me some admiring glances in the work car park before now, so they've certainly built up a good reputation. And whilst they're not the fastest cars in the world (everyone knows that's the 2.0l ) they're the right balance of performance and economy for me!

Notice this passage :

"Study the performance characteristics of this car carefully and you will arrive at an extraordinary conclusion. It may only be a 1.9 litre diesel hatchback, but round a track it will blow a supercharged Mini Cooper into the weeds. It is astonishingly fast."

Wonder if this will settle any arguments about Fabia VRs v Mini Cooper S?

Notice this passage :

"Study the performance characteristics of this car carefully and you will arrive at an extraordinary conclusion. It may only be a 1.9 litre diesel hatchback, but round a track it will blow a supercharged Mini Cooper into the weeds. It is astonishingly fast."

Wonder if this will settle any arguments about Fabia VRs v Mini Cooper S?

Do you need a can opener to re-open a can of worms?

Notice this passage :

"Study the performance characteristics of this car carefully and you will arrive at an extraordinary conclusion. It may only be a 1.9 litre diesel hatchback, but round a track it will blow a supercharged Mini Cooper into the weeds. It is astonishingly fast."

Wonder if this will settle any arguments about Fabia VRs v Mini Cooper S?

Erm, think he must mean a standard Cooper... The Cooper S is a fair bit quicker, and has handling advantages!

The Cooper S is a typo / admin error. It only just managed to beat a standard cooper around the TG track, and the 5th gear track (anglesey)

A remapped vRS will give a cooper S a run for it's money, but again, they're fairly comparable. No point dissing the S too much as it's a decent machine.

Agreed. The CooperS needs a mapped Fabia just to keep up with it. The standard Cooper however is chickenfeed in comparison. Furby like chickenfeed.....chickenfeed gooooood....yum yum yum.

I dunno. I owned a Cooper S that I traded in for my Fabia vRS, in terms of low-end pickup and acceleration from standing, the vRS leaves my old car behind.

If you can keep the S on the boil and keep the revs up it's quicker and will corner faster, but normally it's hard to do that (especially on the North Circular!!).

Round a sharp bend, because of the low end grunt, I'd say the vRS is quicker out of the corner, but of course there are bends that the Mini can take at speed that the vRS can't. Overall I'd say they're not that far apart unless you're talking pure straight-line speed or a constant sequence of medium bends where the Mini has it.

I remember reading his review when it first came out. Pity he wasn't quite so complimentary about it when Top Gear did their head-to-head with the MINI Cooper

This never happened.

It went head to head with a plastic BMW called a "Mini Cooper". No real Mini Coopers were involved.

And so it begins again

... I mean, they even call it a "MINI" <- shouting MINI all the time isn't polite.

Far better to call it what it is for the size of car... "Maxi".

:D

Got a soft spot for Minis and MINIs but I can't fit in the proper old ones and I can't fit DIY cr*p into the new ones. I'll remain a Mini/MINI bystander rather than a Mini/MINI adventurer.

J.

Two cars that I want my Fubaru (!) to outperform by a nice margin: Cooper S and R32. Only a couple of mods away....

Bas

What you all have missed is if you select the link and read the full review that is the report from June 2004... .

So he is not changing his mind now thats always been his feeling & I guess he must feel exactly the same about the performance of the TDI130 in every VAG application.

Two cars that I want my Fubaru (!) to outperform by a nice margin: Cooper S and R32. Only a couple of mods away....

Bas

One of them being 4 wheel drive??

:P;)

Well I can definately confirm that a remapped Furby has better acceleration from 30 mph coming off a roundabout than a Bini cooper S.

On Tuesday I had one trying to go through me on the A21 around Tonbridge Wells, just as I got off the apex of the roundabout onto the dual carrageway , I put my foot down from 2nd gear to NSL of 70MPH, and got there quicker than the Bini. Only found out after i got the chance to pull over into nearside, and it crept past that it was an S :(

The thing is that at the end of the day to make a massive difference from one car to another on the road your really need alot more power than there is between the VRS and Cooper S.

On a track is a different matter

One of them being 4 wheel drive??

:P;)

Actually in comparison I would imagine an ATB-equipped FWD would not be markedly inferior in getting the power down.

I was thinking turbo and injectors upgrades tbh...

If he likes it so much then how come he slated it when Hammond was doing the Cool Wall?...Did it not go into uncool or seriously uncool? If he likes the car so much , then why didn't he say something then , or would that not have been as funny?

Actually in comparison I would imagine an ATB-equipped FWD would not be markedly inferior in getting the power down.

I was thinking turbo and injectors upgrades tbh...

Not getting the power down initially no, but cornering it helps more than an LSD trust me

And 2 Ford's at the top?!?! How can anyone take such a list seriously?

Chris

Jeremey Clarkson also likes...............

Men ( allegedly )

Ann Robinson ( wtf )

Marlborough Lites ( fresh air fags )

The list goes on.

He's a pillock.

Here's his full article:

Skoda Fabia VRS

Johnny Foreigner will love running our red lights in this

Multiculturalism, it has been decided, is a good thing, and consequently, we’re all supposed to crave a beef-stew existence, living cheek by jowl with the celery, the carrots and the swedes.

I’m not sure people in the provinces are quite so enamoured of the idea, but certainly people in London — well, at least people in London who read The Guardian — do seem to like having as many differently flavoured neighbours as possible.

Some super-cool friends of mine were recently being shown round an agreeable school in Wandsworth. They could have asked about the proximity of sports pitches or the Sats averages but instead pointed out to the headmistress that there weren’t many black children in the classrooms. “No, well there wouldn’t be,” she explained, “because there aren’t any diplomatic families round here.”

Of course, in the face of such nonsense, they’ve decided instead to send their child to the Al-Qaeda Mormon Franco/Peruvian Fusion School for Lapsed West African Catholics.

On the whole, I quite like multicultural living; certainly, I like what the recent influx of immigrants has done to the capital’s restaurant scene, but I’m not so sure it works on the road. Imagine, if you will, an Italian attempting to drive, Naples style, through a small town in Alabama, or a Buddhist from Bali trying to negotiate the five-way junction at the Arc de Triomphe, and you start to grasp the problem. In essence, each new British citizen brings with him his own country’s rules of the road, which means that all of a sudden the stew’s got yams in it, and ginger.

Only the other day a middle-aged chap in a pair of ill-fitting Aviator shades pulled alongside me at the lights in his mildly battered W-registered Vauxhall Corsa. All the windows were down, and he was playing Blockbuster by the Sweet at full volume while swigging from a bottle of beer. This may have been a cool look in downtown Ankara, but in Covent Garden, I have to say, it didn’t really work terribly well.

The look, of course, was no big deal, but the preposterous wheelspinning start as the lights went green certainly was. You see, apart from young men in Porsche Boxsters, the British usually drive with a politeness rarely found elsewhere in the world. We tend not to sit in yellow boxes or tailgate on the motorway. And despite various scaremongering reports, expressions of road rage in the UK are usually limited to the wagged finger or the furrowed brow.

Suddenly, though, we’ve been joined by people who are used to running the gauntlet of Sniper’s Alley in Sarajevo, and by Italian exchange students, and those who bought an out-of-state driving licence in Punjab for 20 rupees. As a result, the simple roundabout — a peculiarly British invention that works on the principle of courtesy — has become a white-knuckle ride of fear.

Then there’s the horn. Since the 1950s really, it’s been used in Britain mostly to attract the attention of friends on the pavement. Now, though, it’s used for all sorts of reasons: because it’s there and it works, because some Iranian second division football team has won a match, because of a quashed coup back home, or simply as a pressure valve in traffic jams.

Last week, a swarthy-looking chap in the car behind lent on his hooter for a full two minutes, simply because I hadn’t driven into a junction marked “keep clear”. And yesterday I was very nearly T-boned by someone who had sailed through a red light. Why not? Where he comes from, red lights are seen as pretty, rather than instructive.

On the motorway, you drive for mile after mile behind a car being driven by someone who passed his test on an ox. He simply has no idea that he’s supposed to pull over — the situation never cropped up in Bhutan.

I’m not criticising, you understand. I am not a UKIP lunatic and this is not some Daily Mail rant. I think women should be allowed to wear the burqa at school, and in the supermarket and in the mosque. All I’m saying here is that it’s not such a good idea to wear one while going round Hyde Park Corner.

No, wait — I’m not even saying that. Of course you must be allowed to wear whatever you like while circumnavigating Britain’s busiest junction. But please understand that those of us who have been driving in Britain for the past 25 years are not necessarily aware that the person coming the other way has a bag on their head. So give us some time to adapt, and in the meantime, maybe you could put a sign or something in the back window?

I do think, however, that it might be a good idea for immigration officials to give the new boys a Highway Code when they arrive, or maybe a series of laminated handy hints that could be hung with the religious memorabilia and the spicy air freshener from the rear-view mirror. Stuff like what to do at a red traffic light, how to deal with a yellow box and why it’s not a very good f****** idea to drive around at two in the f****** morning blowing your f****** horn.

There’s another issue, too. People from countries only recently introduced to the car have no idea about the social niceties of what to buy. So they just go out there and buy whatever’s cheap. This means the roads of London are now littered with horrid old Toyota Previas and Nissan Glorias that have been imported on dhows from second-hand car lots in Sharjah. Anything, really, with four seats and a horn.

This brings me on to the Skoda Fabia diesel. Under the dour stewardship of Volkswagen, we’re told that you can now talk about Skoda without an end-of-the-pier drum roll and trombone accompaniment. But let’s be honest; you’ve got to live a fairly style-free existence before you seriously start to consider actually buying one.

At

If he likes it so much then how come he slated it when Hammond was doing the Cool Wall?...Did it not go into uncool or seriously uncool? If he likes the car so much , then why didn't he say something then , or would that not have been as funny?

But as has been explained on TG before, when discussing 'The Cool Wall', just because a car is good at what it does, drives well, handles well etc etc etc, does not necessarily make it 'cool'.

It's a feeling, a perception. Which means you'll see some stuff on that wall that's pretty average to drive. Not singling out the Fabia particularly here, but there you go...

Steve

Well I can definately confirm that a remapped Furby has better acceleration from 30 mph coming off a roundabout than a Bini cooper S.

Second that, I've trounced a few Cooper S, and many more Coopers, an S Works would be another matter.

Andy.