Hot Hatches

Everyone loves a hot hatch. Especially the Brits. Double especially when it’s raining...

- Jack Rix

It’s entirely natural that when faced with a line-up that includes a 710bhp McLaren, hulk-green AMG GT R, a demonic-looking Lambo and one of only two Ford GTs in the country – all with keys in and engines gargling away – the humdrum stuff tends to get ignored. Let’s face it, in a room full of underwear models you wouldn’t be gazing longingly at your other half. Yet this morning the world has flipped upside down, because it’s behind the three hatchbacks, with less horsepower combined than one McLaren 720S, that the queues are forming.

Perhaps the entire TopGear staff has developed a need to deliver more down-to-earth consumer advice? Perhaps we really are just a nation of hot-hatch lovers, and this is the indisputable evidence? Nope, it’s raining heavily – like, Scottish heavily – and has been for an hour. The idea of nursing a £420,000 carbon-fibre diva around a sopping-wet Knockhill on cold cut slicks, has all the appeal of pink haggis on toast – just ask the Editor. What hot hatches represent, then, is a relative safety net: usable power, front-wheel drive, proper visibility, ergonomic familiarity. In terrible conditions they should be the ones that you can jump in and feel most comfortable pushing the envelope. Overstep the mark? Understeer and a missed apex, not several pirouettes and an expensive interface with grass, gravel then wall. That’s the theory, at least.