Road legal rally car

What do you mean by rally spec cars? Lots of people strip their interior to fit bucket seats, harnesses and a cage and tune the engine to similar power levels to WRC cars.

To get to exactly the same spec, though, would be very expensive and many of the modifications would detract from the cars practicality and usability on the road without adding much benefit.

That's what I thought. Those that want one can't afford one. Those that can afford one would rather have something 'nice', or have somewhere better to drive it than the M4.

I don't think 'stones in de asshole' are a feature of every WRC car...

I think you're being a bit naive if you think the aim of magazines and newspapers is to inform and report the news. The aim is to sell as many as possible and if that means sensationalising or embellishing, that's what they'll do. Maybe Evo doesn't aim for the same market as the likes of Top Gear but they do write for spotty teenagers and dreamers... the teens love the hot hatches Evo often write about and us dreamers buy the mag to wk over the beautiful pictures of exotic erotica that we'll never afford.

It's this one - my dad bought it as a write off in '71, was a rally car for years, but has been a race car for the last 12 years, including 5 Goodwood Revivals - both my father and I have raced it - as a baby I was transported around in it in a carrycot strapped to the roll cage!

I won a race at Spa in it, and it's also done the British GP support race - not bad for a car that cost £4.50 as a write off!

Nice, thanks

I can't imagine the general public being upset by that. Confused, curious yes. I love the idea of cars that are inappropriate for the road being used.

On touring stages between special stages, yes that is the case - in fact Petter Solberg had to let his co-driver drive the last stage of Rally Sweden this year after losing his license speeding between stages.

Some large Tarmac rallies etc also have a speed limit for safety reasons - ie Targa NZ has a limit of 200km/h.

Even without that rubbish, my mate's Metro needed an engine strip at 1500 miles and cambelts at 400 miles. When it dropped a valve seat it cost around £25K.

Yes, really.

I've done a bit of motoring journalism myself in my time, so I know the sort of feedback you'd get from your editor if you wrote anything that;
a) didn't pander to the views of your target audience
b) trod on the toes of advertisers
c) seriously pissed on the chips of the person/company who supplied you with the test car

Do you really believe that Evo would publish an article that consisted of several pages of whining about how an iconic (and hence very valuable) car driven by a rally legend was just a pain in the arse for anything other than a close approximation to its natural environment of the rally stage? Their job in such a case is to accentuate the positive - and of course the car is a blast to drive when you get a clear shot a at a nice bit of tarmac in the Welsh mountains, so that's where the story lies.

Never mind the big money of the glossy magazines; I can well recall the dummy-spitting (and threats of withdrawn advertising) that occured when a friend of mine wrote a comparative test of a well-known kit car against the S1 Elise, for CCC magazine, which basically concluded that it was very good indeed but that it would have its work cut out for it competing with the equally good, equally cheap, but more mainstream Elise with its added bonus of Lotus badge kudos.

... or the insistence on rights of editorial comment/veto (and the delicate dance around final wording that often resulted) sometimes demanded by owners/manufacturers of cars that I myself wrote about.

It's one of the reasons I gave up on the game; as anyone who is familiar with my posts here on PistonHeads will tell you, I don't really do rose-tinted glasses, careful diplomacy and delicately balanced half-truths!

I've also driven enough cars with...

• competition spec. engines (usually with fairly narrow power bands)
• competition gearboxes (brutally clunky dog engagement, incredibly noisy straight-cut gears and close ratios that are inapproriate for the wide range of speeds you need to deal with on public roads)
• no sound or heat insulation
• no air-con
• loud exhaust
• cooling system that is marginal because it's not designed with the need to function at slower speeds
• Rose-jointed suspension that transmits every bit of vibration and tyre noise to the shell
• stiff springs and dampers that only offer any compliance when they're getting the pounding they're designed for at competion speeds
• pointy, ulra-quick steering geometry that requires constant correction
• brake pads that need a gorilla to get even the slightest braking effort until they're up to temperature and;
• tyres that only grip (or last more than a few hundred miles) for teh specific surfaces and conditions they're designed for...

...to know that the novelty wears off fairly quickly when you're forced to follow a stream of traffic headed by Reginald Molehusband in his Rover 400 on a country road with limited overtaking opportunities or (even worse) trickling them through heavy traffic in a city centre.

(Disclaimer: yes, I know that not all of the above apply to all competition cars, but it's a pretty typical list).

Honestly: for the daily grind, give me a nice little mainstream hot hatch back or an MX5, any day.

Yep. That sounds pretty much like my mate's 6R4 on the road...