Vauxhall Insignia
Warning: may contain lycra
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To discover if Vauxhall’s flagship offers an unbeatable mix of practicality, value and executive comfort in estate form
It was one of the more painful weekends I can remember. ‘Sports Tourer,’ they call this Insignia derivative. That’s Vauxhall’s marketing pidgin for an estate. So I took it on a ‘sports tour’. Well, a lads’ cycling trip to the Brecon Beacons of an August weekend.
I’ve enjoyed sporadic stints of sustained, semi-serious cycling over the years, but these were my first pedal strokes for some time. Think of it less as a mid-life crisis and more of the ‘Tour de France’ effect. A Welsh bloke wore yellow in Paris, so surely three fat English blokes could ride up a Welsh hillock or six? Pah.
Loading the car, I was nervous. Two bikes plus passengers would be easy but a third might be pushing it. But with just the front wheel off each bike and some old pillows to protect the frames from one another, we slid all three bikes into the boot with ease.
Our declared luggage allowance had been ‘a small sports bag’, but like every budget airline flight you’ve ever embarked on, there was one fella bending the rules with a satchel big enough to have been John Candy’s bobsleigh. Yet the Insignia swallowed the lot, with the 60:40 split folding rear seats allowing a back-seat passenger to sit among the sextet of carbonfibre bicycle fork legs.
The Insignia’s dynamics didn’t change dramatically despite the considerable load, and be it on motorway or horsebox-riddled Welsh country road, the ride remained unflustered. The nature of the car leans more toward ‘Tourer’ than ‘Sports’, wafting as it did through Monmouthshire and Powys, so you tend to drive it more like a gentle cycle to the pub than a sprint along the Champs Elysées.
A few roads in south Wales have been fodder for our photographers for two score years and more. Having joined the snappers in video capacity, I’d occasionally seen a cyclist pound their way up the hillside and into the clouds. Somewhere along the line I thought: ‘I want to give that a go.’
Unlike most of our shoots, though, the sun was well and truly out. It was 27deg C as we finished squeezing into our Lycra like Welsh lamb being forced through a sausage maker.
“Just 45 miles?” questioned my mate. “I’d have thought you’d plan a 60-mile route.” He was blissfully unaware of the hills to come.
In a supercar, the ascent up so-called Black Mountain goes by in a flash, with a hairpin on the way for rear-axle entertainment. In the Vauxhall, you note the automatic gearbox shifting down while you admire the lumpy view passing briskly before you. On a bicycle, you sway, sweat and swear for 40 minutes of relentless grind, nearly toppling off as the road doubles back on itself at the steepest point in the middle of four hours of exercise. A five-mile hill averaging more than 6% is enough to split up a professional cycling race, so for us who only ride twice a year, our calf muscles were screaming louder than the AMG V8 that I last followed up this same stretch.
And the second ride of the year was the very next day. Painful? Absolutely. Masochistic? Certainly. Stupid? Probably. At a temperature of 34deg C, the 80 mountainous miles bordered on self-harm.
At the end of it all sat the Insignia, waiting to sweep up our sodden chamois and squeaking aluminium. The air-con vents that blow out of the centre console into the rear seats saved the most portly member of our peloton from heatstroke. Meanwhile, the accommodating seats and lumbar support meant those up front, both on the bike and in the car, could travel home with what felt like cascades of comfort in the saddle area.
Successful sports tour sorted with minimum faff, maybe it won’t be so long before the next significant spell in the saddle. Maybe.