Relive your youth with this £5,000 Daihatsu Charade GTI

Ever heard the line about how mullets are business up front and party out the back? Well, it’s an awful justification for an even worse haircut, before you could just do the ‘doing it ironically’ hand-wave. The idea, presumably, was to smuggle a bit of party mentality behind the thinnest veneer of sensibility.

And this, somehow, manages to bring us to the late Nineties Charade GTi. Park this smallish hatchback pretty much anywhere and... well, pick your cliché, but we’ll go with Nana stopping off on the way to Morrisons. Yet underneath the amnesia-inducing appearance, the late-stage Charade GTi was still a bona fide pocket rocket – putting about 100bhp and 900kg together with a five-speed manual, three-door hatch and zero distractions is still the right recipe for that today, let alone two decades ago.

Well, we say zero distractions, but this particular Charade has something of a big ’un: a state-of-the-art (for 1997) Pioneer stereo with two subs, twin amps and enough watts to fill a Lil John song.  

But, unlike just about every other Charade with a properly massive Pioneer doof-doof device, this one a) has done just 30,000 miles, b) has a complete service history, and c) hasn’t been crashed out the front of Macclesfield McDonald’s. That’s because it was bought new by Pioneer and used as a show car for its maximum power (or should that be Max Power?) car stereo line, before going to the current owner. That’s it. That’s the whole car history.

So if you like the idea of a proper pocket rocket with the power-to-weight of a new Up GTI, this one’s for auction over at Car and Classic with an estimate of just £5,000. And if anyone gives you stick about driving Nana’s Charade with an Ali G stereo – the mullet of cars, if you will – you could always say you’re doing it ironically.

Images: Car & Classic