SEAT Ibiza FR

When it comes to longer trips the Spanish hatch is largely proving A1

THE A1 ISN’T THE IDEAL TESTING ground for exploring a car’s dynamic strengths and weaknesses, but that’s where the Ibiza has found itself a lot of the time these past few months.

With the water-torture-like process of a house sale to navigate, KM67 XUG has been putting in the hard miles between Bedford and Yorkshire of a weekend. It’s had pretty much everything thrown at it, too – rain, sleet, snow, and thankfully, more recently 25deg C sunshine (hallelujah!).

So, a good opportunity to see how competent it is at doing the family thing: think less long-distance grand tourer, more middledistance mover of me, my wife and the pooch.

And so far it’s proved a comfortable place to be… mostly. Those Alcantara sports seats have provided good support on the 400-mile round trips, with a little bum ache only coming on towards the end. If there is a beef on longer journeys it’s with the steering wheel. At the 9 and 3 o’clock positions there are hard ridges where your thumbs rest, which means you are regularly moving your hands around the wheel to find a more comfortable position, and with no discernible padding it’s not long before it becomes uncomfortable again.

That aside, the FR’S been more than up to the job. No, it isn’t a genuinely quick car, but it is nippy enough to get briskly off the line and for overtakes, and that 1.5-litre turbocharged engine is just eager enough to remind you you’re not in a lesser Ibiza model. It’s a quiet unit, and with little wind or tyre noise, either, lengthier trips are no chore – that is if you don’t mind one of those intermittent buzzes/ rattles that you can never quite pin-point and disappears as soon as you look in its general direction. The engine’s proving frugal, too, with average mpg in the mid-40s (it’s briefly topped 50mpg on longer runs).

The stereo has also come in for praise, the standard system more than good enough to negate splashing £370 on the optional Beats set-up. Given how much time we get to spend listening to it, that’s good news indeed.