DavPaz wrote:
Apart from the keyless wankery, how's the car?
I'd say it's just about on the right side of being usable as a daily driver. (Which let's be honest, is what most of us use our cars as, most of the time.)
In the plus column for this category are most things. It's easy to drive and park, it's good on fuel (long term average is looking to be 34.5mpg, currently this is where it's at after 1650 miles), it's got all the mod cons, it's practical (four doors and a good sized boot, I got the box from Scan with my new PC in it into the boot with the rear seats folded down, and that was a BIG box), the audio system is high quality and I love bluetooth streaming from my phone. (The GT trim of the car gets upgraded speakers among other things and they're really pretty damn good, certainly the match of the B&O speakers in the S4.)
In the minus column are two biggies. One is the utterly uncompromising ride quality, which Honda acknowledged with the new Type-R when they added a 'Comfort' mode to its settings, so where the new one gets Comfort/Sport/Race, mine just has Sport/Race. (And to be clear here, 'Race' is a track setting, that's absolutely what it's intended to be used for and indeed is so astoundingly harsh that's all you can use it for without dislocating several bones. Sport is dialled down from Race, but not by a massive amount..... Moreover, by all accounts the new Type-R's 'Comfort' setting is somewhere between Normal/Sport in cars such as the Golf R and S3.)
Second, linked to the first, is the seat, which is a track bucket seat, and whilst it's comfortable insofar as it holds the body well and is supportive, I find that after an hour's normal driving I'm not sorry to get out of it. (And yet, it fulfills its intended purpose perfectly, which is to say that on a hard drive when you're really pushing it through corners, your whole body is held securely and centrally so you're always in the perfect position for the controls, something I didn't get with the S4 which traded that off for comfort.)
Also, the seating position is too high. Again, Honda have fixed this on the new one, but in mine to get the seating position right my head is higher than I'd like, and I'm not tall, about 5ft11.
Subjectively I still think it looks fantastic, I loved the looks of the car when I first clamped eyes on it and still do, it's a taste thing of course, but for me it's absolutely the business.
My opinion of the car changes regularly, if I get a few days of normal driving and don't get the chance to open it up a a bit or am simply not in the mood to, I do find myself thinking that it's an unnecessarily hardcore vehicle for the driving I'm doing. (Especially if I'm doing more town/family driving than usual, anything other than my daily commute really, which is principally on roads maintained as part of the TT circuit. Off the TT course the quality of our roads is 'variable', and this is not a comfortable car on bumpy roads. Once a week we go out to a farm with Hearthly Jnr for her horse riding/therapy session, you can imagine how much fun it is driving a track-ready Type-R down an unmaintained back road and onto a working farm, parking up next to tractors and hay bales.....)
Then again, given a decent crack at an open road, it's a thrilling, exhilarating car to drive, and I forgive it everything. As chance would have it I've had quite a lot of evening/anti-social hours/weekend working since I got the car, so I've found myself driving over the mountain at all sorts of funny times, quite often pretty much getting the road to myself, so have been able to safely explore what the car is capable of (well, the only risk being to myself), and it's an immensely well-sorted car, far more confidence-inspiring than the S4 was.
The brakes never, ever fade, for starters. The handling is superb, with this and the new Type-R the question is being asked whether or not AWD such as is fitted to the Focus RS is just extra weight for no benefit, with the new Type-R besting the Golf R, Focus RS and BMW 140i in multiple hot-hatch shootouts, in terms of raw performance round a track and also in how good a car it is to drive - and the new Type-R has an awful lot of carry overs from my generation of Type-R.
The trickery with the diff in the front axle is quite something, and the car's ability to pull out of a corner, once you get used to it, is immensely satisfying, even if there's a tendency to wonder 'How does it
do this?'
So yes, when I get the road to myself I'll put the car in 'R' (Race) mode, the dials all turn blood red, and really go for it, and it's incredible.
All that said, it'll be gone by this time next year.