Sunday afternoon's alright for driving:

at least on the east coast.

Jez gave me a lift* to Craiglockhart to view and test drive my first potential Nürburgring car. It was a 1.9 Peugeot 205 GTI and I'd been an assiduous little car nerd and printed out a load of buyer's guides for it beforehand. I prodded it, bounced the corners up and down and generally behaved like an obsessive nitpicker. In the end I couldn't really find much wrong with it that would cost more than a couple of hundred quid to fix, and at £995 I couldn't complain.

The test drive, though, was...informative. The gear shift was far too sloppy (worn out linkage somewhere?); the steering was bus-like in weight (not a mechanical problem, but a 'feature' of the car, it seems) and there was a persistent clonk noise from the rear suspension (worn out bearings, needing £600 worth of dealer work, or £125 in parts and apparently a month off work for the DIY solution). The heavy steering coupled with front drive made it feel a little reluctant to corner, although once it did it was pretty much without body roll.

Despite all of this, it was still fairly impressive. The engine was obviously still in pretty good nick and it pulled surprisingly well on the motorway without sounding strained. By the time we came back, I was seriously considering getting my hands dirty and fixing the suspension myself, and was hoping that the gearbox fix wouldn't be as nasty as all that.

It was only in the last minute that I was convinced otherwise. Selecting reverse to park, the gears persisted in crunching, even with the clutch fully depressed. We bargained the guy down to £900, but the screwed gearbox seemed like a problem too far and we politely took our leave.

Conclusions: £1000 probably isn't quite enough to buy a car that I'll be confident won't seize up at 120 mph; on reflection, 205 GTIs are getting a bit long in the tooth to ever be as problem-free as I want, and lastly, I'm more attached to rear-wheel drive than I had thought. So now I need a new model to fixate on, and it looks like it's going to have to be an MX-5 or an MR2. Unless anyone has any less hairdresser-type ideas...

* Jez is now the proud, lunatic owner of a Fiat Coupé Turbo. He took it easy on the way to see the 205, popping the clutch in 2nd gear only a couple of times. I was reminded of Jason's Skyline GT-S, the one car in which I've ever been truly afraid for my life. Coming out of Oban during a camping trip, he accelerated up the hill and I'm pretty sure that the rate of acceleration was increasing as we thundered up it. When we came to the corner at the top I thought "Right; this is it," as the forest yawned before us. He nonchalantly yanked the wheel to the left and the car clung to road with the tyres squelching and the engine roaring and we conspicuously stayed alive. Not something I want to do again. Unless I'm driving.