From just too weird to just too twee, ALWYN VILJOEN experiments with the best possible cures for male menopause
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| Daihatsu’s Copen gives real driving pleasure with oodles of aaah-factor for free. |
MAKERS of two-seater roadsters long ago realised there are two types of sports-car buyers — people who like to convert their kilo-Watts back to horsepower; and people with friends to impress.
It is for the party people that the three road cars shown here were made. From the start, they were designed to make a fashion statement, with fittings pillaged from other platforms and engines that only tugs a forelock at the formulae of Messrs Watt and Newton.
To answer the inevitable question from the horsepower crowd (who don’t care for sexy), the Pug is the pick of the three. It can play, if not hardball, at least handball with any proper sportscar.
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| Pick of the bunch, the Peugeot RCZ, rides, handles and will still look as fashionable as a little black number in 2035. |
For its a hard reality of life that your average driver will not go any faster around the twisties in a Porsche 911, than in the cheaper Peugeot. And in the pug, you won’t look like you are compensating either.
Sure, the front-wheel driven little Pug’s 147 kW, 1,6 engine with twin-scroll turbos is not nearly as powerful on paper as the engine of say, a Nissan 370 Z, but this is important only if you are a racer in drag — sorry, drag racer — who hardly touches the steering wheel.
Take the Pug off a straight line to hurl it into corners and your smile will get as loopy as the road.
With the tyres placed as far apart as the corners allow, and the suspension seemingly designed at the same time God did the hummingbird, this Peugeot just soaks up the ugliest bumps, and instinctively noses out the right line through the apex.
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| The hard riding Mini Cooper Coupe is absolutely exclusive, but brace yourself for a lot hate. |
The car that doesn’t so much nose out the apex as slobbers all over it like a bulldog, is the Mini Cooper Coupe. Never have I driven a more gloriously pointless vehicle but — and this is an important but — the Cooper Coupe is so rare, it still turns heads a year after launch, and will do so ad infinitum.
So this is “The One” for the really beautiful people. With really beautiful teeth. And absolutely no fillings.
For at legal speeds in the hard-riding Cooper Coupe, fillings do rattle loose and over the first pebble, the racing chassis will jab your coccyx through your primordial brain and try to wrestle the steering wheel from your hands.
At illegal speeds on a race track, all this comes together as the wheels make happy little squeals of joy.
Brace yourself for a lot of hate on the open road, however...
People either love or hate this Mini “toupe”, and the haters will not give you an inch of space.
The big surprise among the trio is Daihatsu’s Copen.
Although my hair gets all static from rubbing against the folding alluminum roof, I cannot sing the praises of this tiny Japanese enough.
Daihatsu is Japan’s oldest car maker with real racing cred, and all of it shows in this little toy car.
With a kerb weight of only 850 kilograms, it can make the most of its tiny 1,3 mill, even with two in the bucket seats.
A short wheelbase, slick gearbox and responsive steering all synergise to make this frisky Noddy car a much bigger vehicle than the sum of its tiny parts suggests.
Which is why it has fan clubs and forums dedicated to it from Phoenix, KZN to Singapore.
LAUNCH PRICES
• Mini Cooper Coupe:
R319 000
• Daihatsu Copen (discontinued in 2009):
R209 995
• Peugeot RCZ:
R391 500
