Going The Wrong Way
by David Finlay (08 Aug 03)

 
It makes good marketing sense for Skoda to associate the Fabia vRS hot hatch with the WRC contender which made its first competition appearance in this year's German Rally, but there isn't what you might call a lot of crossover. The vRS has half the number of driven wheels, rather less than half the power output and (fortunately) costs nowhere near half as much to build or maintain. Admittedly, both cars are turbocharged, but the fuel being compressed by the respective turbo units is also different, because unlike its rallying pseudo-counterpart the vRS runs on diesel.

In this day and age it's by no means a daft notion to have a diesel as the high-performance model in a range. There's actually a very good precedent within the Volkswagen Group, namely the Seat Ibiza TDi Sport, which could hardly be more relevant since it shares an awful lot of its components with the Fabia.

Skoda quotes a 127mph maximum speed and a 0-62mph acceleration time of 9.6 seconds, figures which are so close to those claimed for the Ibiza as to be effectively identical. As with the power output, these numbers do not equate to the same kind of real-world behaviour as they would for a petrol car. The vRS feels much, much faster than the stats suggest because it has extraordinary mid-range grunt.

Mid But Not Right Down

It comes in pretty low down, though not as low as you might expect. While other diesels are already starting to pull strongly from tickover, this one does absolutely nothing below about 1600rpm, and you sometimes find yourself having to take a lower gear for a slow corner than you might expect. If you let the engine dip below that speed, meaningful acceleration becomes a thing of the past and you have to wait for it to haul itself into the power band. But once you've done that, you can impose a 2500rpm limit on yourself and still cover the ground remarkably quickly. Or you can keep your foot down until the rev counter needle reaches 4500, though personally I find this less satisfying.

The combination of huge torque and relatively modest overall weight means that Skoda, like Seat, is able to use very high gearing indeed. The Fabia doesn't quite match the Ibiza's 39mph per 1000rpm in sixth, but it comes very close, which makes it one of the most long-legged cars on the market. Yet sixth is a perfectly useable ratio, as long as you make sure you don't dip below the magic 1600rpm figure.

High gearing means good fuel economy. Despite the performance, the Fabia returns 67.3mpg extra urban and 55.4mpg combined in the official tests. In turn, good fuel economy means low CO2 emissions - in this case just 138g/km.

What can I say? Full marks to the Fabia all the way so far. But regardless of all that, I think the vRS is one of the most disappointing cars I've driven in years.

And here's why. Skoda doesn't make great claims for the handling of the vRS but does refer to it as being fairly sporty, and also refers to a "high level of driving comfort". Reasons given are the fitment of larger anti-roll bars at both ends along with stiffer springs and dampers, and a ride height which is 15mm lower than that of standard Fabias.

Losing The Plot

Well, the vRS may be lower than the other cars in the range, but it doesn't look it. The 16" wheels are fitted with very low profile tyres (45 section to be precise) and this leaves a large gap under each of the wheel arches. This is not especially pleasing to the eye, but the more important point is that those short and therefore none too flexible sidewalls do very little to suppress small bumps in the road. As a result, the ride is very harsh even at town speeds.

The vRS might just about have got away with this if the suspension had been set up to give pin-sharp handling, but this is far from being the case. The springs feel very soft - I couldn't believe how much movement there was when I pushed down on a front wing before getting behind the wheel - and although I'm quite a fan of softly sprung cars they do have to be very well damped. In fact the Fabia's shock absorbers do not provide anything like enough damping.

On a completely ripple-free surface this would make life difficult enough, as the shocks would struggle to control the effects of braking, accelerating and changing direction. On bumpier roads (and Skoda rather bravely ran the UK press launch in an area where the roads could not exactly be mistaken for billiard tables) the suspension simply becomes confused. The Fabia never, ever feels confident of what is going on as you turn into corners, and as soon as it hits a bump it has to devote all its concentration on sorting out the after-effects. There is nothing left over for good handling.

Why Sign It Off?

So . . . on the one hand the vRS rides like a cement mixer, and on the other it handles like a cross-channel ferry. This is the worst possible compromise, and it leads me to wonder who exactly drove the last of the prototypes and said, "yes, this is fine, don't touch a thing."

It wouldn't take long to fix it. Higher-profile tyres, stiffer springs, better damping, perhaps a further reduction in ride height - this is not rocket science, and with appropriate tweaking it could all transform the vRS into an absolutely superb hot hatch. A revised version brought on to the market as soon as possible would be more welcome than I can say.

On a slightly different note, several of my fellow scribblers on the launch expressed the view that the vRS has a very ordinary interior for a car which costs around £12,000. I agree with them. The cabin area seems reasonable in cheaper Fabias but a bit stingy in this one. At the same time, I don't think any of us would have raised the subject if the vRS had been as much fun to drive as we had hoped and expected that it would.

It's all so disappointing. I wanted the vRS to be, at the very least, as good as the remarkable Ibiza Sport, one of the most impressive cars I drove in 2002. Furthermore, like many other motoring writers, I rather like Skoda's smallest car - the turbo diesel estate we tested is still spoken of in hushed and admiring tones in the CARkeys office, even though it left our hands nearly a year ago. The vRS could so easily be turned into the high point of a very appealing range, but in its present form it is by a long way the worst Fabia.

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