Honda Civic Type R
As stunning as the Type R is, the little Yaris GRMN is a reminder of how playful hot hatches used to be
IRECENTLY FOUND MYSELF WITH 90 minutes to kill in a part of the UK that I don’t know particularly well. It was nearly dusk and it had been lashing down with rain all day, but rather than holing up in a coffee shop and browsing the prices of early Clio 197s and road-legal P1 GTRS on my phone, I decided to get out of town, select a minor road at random and head off into the countryside.
Rainwater was flooding off the fields and collecting in large pools on the bumpy, rough and often narrow lanes, while sight lines would come and go as hedges went and came. Not exactly a perfect recipe for a great drive, you might think, yet that is exactly what I had – in a Toyota Yaris.
It may have a silly price (£26,295!), but at that time, on those roads, the little GRMN felt worth every penny. It was completely in its element, its light weight and forgiving ride allowing it to skim over surface imperfections, its talkative chassis feeling at home gently slip-sliding over muddy patches, and its supercharged engine offering ample output for the territory. The experience reminded me of everything I used to love about hot hatches, but it also made me realise how the breed of bigger, much more powerful hatchbacks that tend to dominate our attention these days are altogether different machines.
That a 577bhp Mercedes-amg GT R and a 209bhp Yaris (see page 064) do their best work in different environs is not a huge surprise. However, the Civic Type R also operates at its best on different roads to the Toyota. The Honda’s larger size and firmer ride in particular rule out the kind of lanes where the compact and more compliant GRMN shone for me – the type of deliciously quiet and complex backroads that hot hatches of 20-or-so years ago used to thrive on. Along these stretches the Civic would feel too wide to be truly wieldy and would simply be unpleasant as it battled the jagged tarmac passing beneath its wheels. The boosty nature of its turbocharged engine would probably frustrate, too, and you’d hardly ever get to exploit its full 316bhp.
The contrast really brought home to me just how serious the most potent hot hatches have become. Not that this is a bad thing
per se: cars such as the Civic can be absolutely stunning when driven on the kind of roads that suit them best, i.e. wider, better surfaced and ideally bone-dry ones. And, of course, there is the flip-side that cars such as the Yaris might feel a bit lost when asked to tackle those roads. But it does feel as if, as hot hatches have evolved, playfulness has been swapped for precision; the ability for them to plaster a huge smile on your face has been traded for the prowess to get your heart pounding even faster and leave you with your eyes wide open.
Which you prefer is down to personal taste, I guess. Me? I certainly miss the former, but I can’t deny I find the latter hugely exciting. If I had to make a choice between these two cars I’d pick the Civic. But I would have nothing but admiration for anyone who chose the Yaris.