Fiat 124 Spider
Italian passion arrives in the form of a red roadster
Spring is here and with it a small roadster. This is excellent news. Spring is the season for a small roadster, especially an Italian one. All that fresh air to enjoy, the scent of budding blossom, a hint of actual heat from the sun, actual blue from the sky. So I’ll ignore the fact I live in South London, where it’s not actually that green, the scents are less… enticing, and the car I’m driving isn’t, strictly speaking, Italian. But it is a small roadster, a class of car infused with joie de vivre, and for that reason alone I’m optimistic for the next few months. This summer there’s bound to be a heatwave,* and at some point I’ll be sporting a forehead in a shade I’ll call Passione Red. I’ll have got that for free, whereas you have to pay £350 to have it on the car. I know it’s a cliche, but when I looked at other options – black, grey, silver – they all seemed rather drab. Our 124 Spider is a range-topping Lusso Plus version. For £4,000 less there’s the entry Classica model, but you really need to upgrade to at least Lusso trim to get the good stuf (heated leather seats, seven-inch touchscreen with nav, Bluetooth, DAB radio, climate control, keyless, rear-view camera, etc). On top of that the Plus throws in LED lights and Bose audio. I expect the lighter evenings mean I’ll have little chance to test the headlights, but I’m looking forward to giving the tunes a workout – not least because small roadsters usually have pretty tinny sound systems.
But it’s the more overt charms of the Spider that I’m most looking forward to. Not just driving with the roof down (dropping it is the work of less than fve seconds), but enjoying a snappy six-speed manual gearbox and utilising the MX-5-thumping 177lb ft of torque from the turbocharged engine. Why this version and not the faster 168bhp Abarth you might be thinking? Two reasons: a) it’s £5,000 cheaper and only 30bhp down and b) the Abarth tries a bit too hard to be sporty. We reckon we’ll prefer the more understated, relaxed appeal of the Fiat version. Time will tell. (*Other weather forecasts are available...)