POCKET ROCKET
Meet the new Suzuki Swift Sport
Ishould've been more explicit. Due to a slight communications goof, the pick-up of this little Suzuki began with a rocky February 9 flight through stormy weather over Tauranga's coastline.
That was followed by a fiveminute taxi ride with a man named John, who was extremely proud of his skanky 400,000km Toyota Prius.
Irony is best when it blindsides you, and February 9 happened to be the fourth anniversary of the date my first car arrived in New Zealand. That first car was a Suzuki Swift Sport.
It was a 2012 model in “Boost Blue” — imported independently out of Japan with no CD player and some deeply kerbed wheels.
It immediately attracted the hatred of friends who simply couldn’t understand why a grown man who supposedly loved cars would voluntarily spend his own money on such a “mum mobile”. The notion of “driving a slow car fast”, the idea that curly B roads are more fun than racing between traffic lights, and the fact that it was arguably the last “pure” hot hatch made were all often-cited rebuttals; and possibly topics for another day.
I tried hard, very hard, to stay “professional”, but waiting in the crowded showroom for the 2018 variant took my heart right back to the excited anxiety of my first car's arrival.
“Apologies for the wait, our valets are just finishing cleaning it now,” they said. Whether they registered that the car was set to drive from Tauranga to Auckland via a four-hour drive in the wrong direction to Feilding — a trek almost guaranteed to render its shiny yellow paintwork disgustingly bug-spattered and filthy — was another question entirely. A question I duly ignored
proportioned”. The gearknob position feels too far back, especially if you're driving it backto-back with its dad. Which is exactly what we did.
The biggest changes to the Swift Sport are all under the skin — a hallmark of any decent aspiring fun machine.
It's built on the all-new Heartect platform, which means comprehensive weight savings while also improving stiffness.
Combined with cheapo plastics inside and a length that's 10mm shorter than the old car, it adds up to a bubbly hatchback that packs a feather-light kerb weight of 970kg as tested.
Stiffened, too, is the suspension: Macpherson struts up front, and torsion beam at the back. A beefed-up brake package sits behind wheels wrapped in Continental ContiSportContact5 rubber.
It's the engine we have to talk about, though. Suzuki has utilised a version of one of its Vitara motors, a 1.4-litre turbocharged 16-valve Booster Jet unit that creates 103kW of power and 230Nm of torque.
Sure, none of that jumps off the page, with an increase of 3kW over the old car looking almost pathetic on first reading. But, with torque up by 70Nm and 90kg less heft to hurl around, the revised engine completely changes everything. Power peaks at 5500rpm, but the Sport is clearly at its best between 2500rpm and 5000rpm.
In the old car, there was almost no torque low in the rev range, but in the new car it's present in
abundance. It’s subsequently much fiercer car off the mark (it’ll hit 100km/h in 7.2 seconds); and with power delivery remaining pleasantly linear, it makes this the easiest Swift Sport to live with yet.
In corners, it feels sharper, too. The enthusiastic “like a go-kart“methodology of the old car is maximised by wheels closer to the corners and steering that, though electric, offers a surprising amount of morse code communication from the front wheels.
It’s incredibly impressive, and incredibly quick. And priced at $28,500 for the manual variant, it’s by a mile the most fun you can have for under 30 grand . . . even 40.
Yet, there’s a problem. The old Sport had no torque, instead making all its power at the very top end. In order to extract the most from it, you had to gamble, take risks, and hit all your markers with precision.
It might have been “just a Swift”, but when you had it percolating, it was a white-knuckle experience that would suck the colour from your passenger’s faces and have you craving the next set of apexes.
I’m not saying the new Sport isn’t fun. It is — it’s huge fun, an instant classic. But with almost no reason to rev it out to its maximum and all the boogie coming on so soon, it simply isn’t as fun as its forefathers.
In a shrinking market, it sticks out as an obvious yardstick and a wonderful car. But if it’s satisfying, rewarding motoring that you hero . . . consider turning back the clock.