Fabia vRS: extreme drive

People will tell you they love character. That they love quirk and eccentricity, that it’s important to be ‘just that little bit different’. They will then buy a Volkswagen. Proper non-linear choices are for other people, excuses mumbled and quickly forgotten as daydreams get furiously battered by resale values and the potential for disparaging sucking of teeth down the pub. It takes a brave soul to really buck the system. Which is Skoda’s niche. A company providing an excuse to buy a VW without actually buying a VW. The rather elegant paradox of conformist non-conformity.

Words: Tom Ford
Photos: Justin Leighton

This feature was originally published in the February issue of Top Gear magazine

So you buy a Skoda Fabia vRS with the caveat that ‘underneath it's a Polo GTi', except with cooler adverts on the telly and two-and-a-half grand left in the bank account. But for people interested in cars, is the Skoda hot hatch really as soulful as the adverts suggest? Is it truly a stand-alone Skoda, or just a Primarni Polo GTi?

To find out, TopGear finds itself in the Lake District. And it's raining. Not casual, light-hearted rain, but a deluge. Every brief sojourn outside the warm refuge of the car brings a few hundred freezing molestations insinuating themselves between collar and neck.

Stand outside for more than a minute or two, and despite wearing the finest anorak technology meagre wages can buy, you'll feel the storm slip questing, cold, pervy little fingers between the waistband of those technical overtrousers and your previously toasty skin. Sod this, I think, and get back in the car, leaving photographer Leighton outside to take more pictures. He looks shipwrecked. I smile and crank the heater. He smiles back, but it doesn't reach his eyes.

No wonder they call it the Lake District. The main roads sway and coil around the lakes under the bald and glowering blackness of trees curled tight against winter. Even the main carriageways have been badly beaten by the elements, appearing in parts to have been chewed. And then spat back out. This is already a stiff test, and we're headed towards the Hardknott and Wrynose passes, contentiously the steepest roads in the UK and certainly some of the most challenging, if you value both sanity and sump integrity.

Worryingly, even the approach road is currently a junior river deep enough to float little freights of ice. Feeling like a miniature blue Titanic, the vRS wriggles and darts, relatively wide 205-section front tyres dragging themselves into slushy channels, swishing their way through water deep enough to entirely cover the tarmac. The traction control clicks and whirrs, flickering through the steering with a series of irregular tugs, signalling its complicity with the front tyres via a blinking yellow eye in the dash.

The 1.4-litre TSI ‘twincharged' engine (both super and turbo) warbles merrily away under the grumble of the 17-inch wheel and tyre combo, the cabin a simple and pleasant place to sit, decently built if not luxuriously appointed. But there's still an honest integrity to it. The 300-mile A- and M-way run up here has been utterly agreeable, the seats comfortable, the boot capacious. It should be. Point of order: this set-up is deemed so worthy, it's sold in not just two but three flavours. The Fabia vRS has 178bhp, a seven-speed DSG gearbox - there is no manual option - and is mechanically all but identical to both the Seat Ibiza Cupra and that Volkswagen Polo GTi, both of which it undercuts significantly in terms of price.

No surprise that on an A-road, the vRS feels pretty damn good. The supercharger swells the lower end of the torque curve so that there's always most of the 184lb ft of torque available until the turbo and 178bhp can make its presence felt further up the rev range. The brakes are powerful, the steering accurate - neither sanctioning an excess of tactility. The seven-speed DSG grates a bit with a hesitant take-up from a standstill - despite a hill-holder brake - but once you get going and hit a rhythm, it slips between ratios quickly enough. Even in this Biblical weather, it feels neat, fizzy and chuckable, dealing with normal bumps in a slightly choppy but manageable fashion.

Off the main road, up past a stone-built farm that is slowly but inexorably being reclaimed by the mossy hillside, and suddenly we're at the base of the Wrynose. Signs feebly point out terrible hazards, and as we bumble further up the single track, it's as if some capricious godling has beaten the sky flat with a lump hammer and colourwashed it in bleak primer grey. It is still, to quote the proverbial, [a rude word] it down. Russet bracken and impassive hillocks of grey rock coat the landscape. There's a jaw-dropping beauty to the starkness of it, but bloody hell, it's not exactly welcoming.

I'm glad I'm in the Fabia. These little, bumpy, technical roads are where this car should shine, making a mockery of anything bigger and more powerful, the lunatic waveform of the surface and U-shaped crown of the road almost touching the middle of the front bumper. It's absurdly narrow in places, genuinely bewildering on some of the downhill hairpins. Put it this way: injudicious speed would result not in a ditch-scraped wheel or embarrassing hedgetangle, but bouncing off millennia-old rocks in a repeated and painful fashion. It doesn't matter how many airbags you have, it'd be like trying to break an anvil by hitting it with your face. Turns out that it doesn't matter. After three of the decidedly precipitous hairpins, I'm disappointed. 

The problem, in the main, is the DSG gearbox. Now I'm not some Luddite who believes that things were better when smallpox was on the school curriculum and houses were constructed of wattle and Black Death, but I'm a firm believer in applying technology appropriately. In the vRS, it hasn't happened. The DSG emphatically does not suit this car when you want to play, and the very first time the gearbox doesn't do as you instruct it, the car is compromised. In a hot hatch, that's a poisonous and fatal mistake. A hot hatch should be an ally. A supercar can levy extremity against a frisson of lethality, a few niggles that have to be accepted and driven around. A typical hatch has no such excuse.

Here's the basics: the DSG will not, even in manual mode, hold a gear at the red line, so you may charge into a corner expecting to brush against a rev-limiter and find yourself on the brakes with the gearbox having just changed up. It will, it seems, arbitrarily choose gears in ‘sport' mode, hesitate, and get confused if you drive down a bumpy, twisty lane and constantly modulate your throttle. It works in reliable situations, where responses can be predicted, but its peculiar mechanical autism can't cope with change. It's infuriating.

It doesn't stop there. Where the Fabia copes with big bumps on big roads, as soon as it encounters anything tiny and cosmetically traumatised, it suddenly gets wooden knees. Too hard, not enough time to breathe between bumps, so a very knobbly road ends up being a staccato series of bounces from one axle-tramping lump to another. Admittedly, the Hardknott and Wrynose are probably some of the most extreme examples of both gradient and suspension-upsetting tarmac - at one point, the little Skoda was wagging a rear wheel 10 inches in the air on an uphill hairpin whose surface looked as if it had recently been groomed by goats - but the point stands.

Sitting at the top of the pass just as blazing sunshine chisels through the cloud, looking out and down at one of the most remarkable roads in the UK, it was impossible not to conclude that the vRS makes a poor champion for what is essentially a sacrifice of individuality to sate economies of scale. It might make financial sense to adopt the template of the Polo GTi, it might - in nearly every objective sense - make the pugnacious little Skoda a ‘better' car, but in the translation, Skoda has miscued.

In a world where car manufacturers are breeding niches to the point of deformity, Skoda has gaily abandoned one; the previous-generation Fabia vRS was a diesel (60+ mpg) manual and unique, a cult hit, a legend in its own lunchtime. It was also under £12k, cheap to insure and run. It made sense surfing down a bumpy back road with absorbent suspension and a torquey delivery. Less technologically flamboyant and ultimately a lot less speed, but it had a reason. It may have pillaged the VW parts bin, but it was nothing but a Skoda.

A RenaultSport Clio for five hundred quid more would murder this vRS. And without the USP of diesel manual, it no longer has any dynamic jokers to play. So it's a price thing. And yes, you'd buy this vRS over a Polo GTi simply because it does everything the Polo does for a lot less money. But you wouldn't buy it because it did anything differently. The vRS is the perfect car for people who want to be seen to be different, while remaining exactly the same. But real free-thinkers will be left wondering where the old vRS has gone to die.