RE: Ford Puma: Spotted
Discussion
aaron_2000 said:
And as usual, people miss the point. Nobody is gonna buy it to rag it, if they were then they'd go get a£600 1.7 and rebush it. It's gonna live in shows and a garage most likely.
Exactly. This is an extremely rare example of a good, mildly interesting car. Yes a 1.7 is better, and I personally wouldn't pay over £5k for it, but someone might.Do love a Puma. Keep thinking about buying one for a fun/track car
Limpet said:
Fastdruid said:
Did you ever drive one?
If anything the 1.6 was the s
t one, only 100cc down on the 1.7 but barely any more power than the 1.4.
I agree. The 1.4 was a really sweet engine compared to the 1.6, and barely any slower.If anything the 1.6 was the s
t one, only 100cc down on the 1.7 but barely any more power than the 1.4.The 1.7 is really the one to have though. We bought a shed of one a couple of years ago as a cheap track car. No mods at all, and it was far from disgraced on track in the company of significantly more expensive cars. The corner speed you can carry is just incredible, and like Peugeots of a certain era, you can take absolute liberties with it to the point of over-driving it to a degree, and the chassis never falls apart. That said, I did spin it into turn one at Abingdon, but that was me being a dick! ;-) Brakes could only stand four laps at a time, but otherwise it never faltered. One of the nicest gear changes of any car I've driven, too.
Lovely light, communicative and beautifully balanced thing with a peach of an engine. Just a shame the underside had turned to bran flakes, as they almost all do.
Edited by Limpet on Wednesday 3rd April 12:48
These are strange. For years I decided they must be for girls and passed up the chance to buy a 2 year old one from a family friend when I was 21.
Fast forward ten years and I had £1000 and wanted a fun car. Managed to find a Puma that had recent receipts for everything big and only the earliest signs of tin worm. I loved it.
I spent days off work just driving the thing, did a couple of euro road trips and used it as a daily driver. If didn't let me down once and never failed to make me smile. It was possible to drive it flat out everywhere and going into the higher gears didn't make the motor any less eager to rev. It was quite practical as a car for two with loads of boot space too.
A lack of space meant I sold it but as soon as I have dry storage I'll be searching again. I'd like to restore and sympathetically improve one as a forever toy.
Fast forward ten years and I had £1000 and wanted a fun car. Managed to find a Puma that had recent receipts for everything big and only the earliest signs of tin worm. I loved it.
I spent days off work just driving the thing, did a couple of euro road trips and used it as a daily driver. If didn't let me down once and never failed to make me smile. It was possible to drive it flat out everywhere and going into the higher gears didn't make the motor any less eager to rev. It was quite practical as a car for two with loads of boot space too.
A lack of space meant I sold it but as soon as I have dry storage I'll be searching again. I'd like to restore and sympathetically improve one as a forever toy.
Funk said:
mrtwisty said:
Dal3D said:
largely ridiculed as a girls car.
I had a bit of that from a couple of acquaintances when I had mine years ago. My reply was always to throw them the keys and ask them what they thought when they got back from a drive.I never found anyone with an ounce of petrol in their veins who didn't have a lot of fun in a well sorted Puma on an interesting b-road.
I was between cars for a bit back in 2012 and she was looking to move it on for something with an auto box; I said I'd take it on and run it until I sorted myself another car. The Puma was a hoot to drive without needing to hit silly speeds to get a sense of fun and involvement! I still think it has the best gearshift of any car I've ever driven and the engine loved to be revved.
My only criticisms of the car were the love/hate relationship with the gearlever (felt fantastic to use unless it was winter or summer when it would either be icy cold or screaming hot!), the seats which could have done with a little more support and finally the boot lid which dumped rain straight into the boot when you opened it in the wet. Speaking of wet, the other thing that seemed like daft design was the wheelarch liner material - this gets soaked (obviously) and then holds the moisture in place against various bits which then corroded...
I'm surprised that Ford don't have plans for something interesting in that space; the ingredients could even still be the same - take the Fiesta chassis and pop a coupé body on it, the engines are already there to do it all the way up to an 'ST' variant. They could even do a roadster variant to compete with cars like the MX-5 and Fiat 124 Spider. Ford are already seeing their market share at the top end squeezed with fewer and fewer people buying things like Mondeos or the Vignale (isn't that just a posher Mondeo?) and cars like the new Fiesta ST and Focus variants have shown they know how to make fun, interesting cars that handle and go well. I think they're missing a trick...
I sold the car on for her around 2013 to someone a few counties over, bizarrely I then spotted it parked up again in my local town late last year!
Salmonofdoubt said:
A lack of space meant I sold it but as soon as I have dry storage I'll be searching again. I'd like to restore and sympathetically improve one as a forever toy.
A man after my own heart.I will at some point build a Puma with around 200bhp. Ideally I'd like to do it nasp with a K20 or 2ZZ to maintain the same zingy character, but realistically it would make more sense to use the JTJB (?) from a Fiesta when prices drop.
Bone Rat said:
I had a silver one S910 UEW if you still exist!
MOT expired 2016 so maybe. I looked up our old one... W621 VOC, last MOT'd 2009...which was us. So I can only presume it's gone. 
Equally my sisters old one... R433 BOK (a single letter away from being a very good numberplate) last MOT was a fail in 2009 (and it was tbh much tattier and higher mileage than ours as well).
paulyv said:
Well if it's pictures we're sharing I'll paste the usual one of my 100 pound Puma.
Upgraded last year to a 300 pound Puma. Still doing track days in it.
On a semi-related note my then gf did a Puma rally day in ~2006 or so which was by all accounts great fun. They had the Puma's and Subaru's and at the end of the day had a competition as to who was fastest over three laps of the "stage". She came second overall, 5sec behind the fastest which was the AWD Subaru with ~150hp more. Upgraded last year to a 300 pound Puma. Still doing track days in it.
Crap photo of some sideways dirt action.
mrtwisty said:
A man after my own heart.
I will at some point build a Puma with around 200bhp. Ideally I'd like to do it nasp with a K20 or 2ZZ to maintain the same zingy character, but realistically it would make more sense to use the JTJB (?) from a Fiesta when prices drop.
Funnily enough I’d always thought that building a nasp one would be good, but the current ST motor and diff set up would be ace in a Puma shell. I will at some point build a Puma with around 200bhp. Ideally I'd like to do it nasp with a K20 or 2ZZ to maintain the same zingy character, but realistically it would make more sense to use the JTJB (?) from a Fiesta when prices drop.
Many moons ago I saw a 1.7 lump for sale that had been a developmental thing for single seaters and it was running 250+ bhp without any forced induction. That would have made for an awesome if fragile track car.
Fastdruid said:
Bone Rat said:
I had a silver one S910 UEW if you still exist!
MOT expired 2016 so maybe. I looked up our old one... W621 VOC, last MOT'd 2009...which was us. So I can only presume it's gone. Equally my sisters old one... R433 BOK (a single letter away from being a very good numberplate) last MOT was a fail in 2009 (and it was tbh much tattier and higher mileage than ours as well).
It had 100% clean mot's until 2011 which I doubt were kosher as underneath looked like filo pasty.
It failed it's mot massively so I sold as scrap/spares even though it was mint above the water line and looked just like the car in the OP. Looks like it didn't have the welding done and that popped up again probably after an unsuspecting new owner took it to a different mot tester.
These things are great but why Ford never used decent steel or treated them is beyond me.
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