Road legal rally car

ummm i thought rally car has to be road legal regardless.

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Never mind the big money of the glossy magazines; I can well recall the dummy-spitting (and threats of withdrawn advertising) that occured when a friend of mine wrote a comparative test of a well-known kit car against the S1 Elise, for CCC magazine, which basically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.