Comparison Tests
It was the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel, who once said, "The desert can do strange and terrible things to a man." Or maybe that was Bob Hope. Or Bob Bondurant.
Whatever, that would explain why it is that our hearty and largely stable crew went straight-up paranoid during this comparison test of hot-rod hatchbacks. Well, it would explain it if not for the fact that the paranoia set in well before we began tripping over California high-desert brush.
It started at the airport in Detroit when a representative from Honda, which builds one of the cars in this comparison test, stole our boarding passes. Playfulness or sabotage? Why would he not want us to board that plane? He returned them to us, but then curiously took the flight to Los Angeles with us. Coincidence? No company would be so bold as to try to influence the decision of our unimpeachable staff with a bit of last-minute PR trickery, would it?
We were to test the current batch of hot-rodded hatchbacks. The Ford SVT Focus, the Honda Civic Si, and the Volkswagen GTI sell in minuscule numbers compared with, say, mid-size sedans-Honda expects to sell only about 12,000 to 18,000 of its new hatchback-only Civic Si and Ford's in-house tuner, SVT Engineering, will build just 7500 hopped-up Focuses.
Automakers see these inexpensive runabouts as their shot to capture more than just the money of young buyers. Acceptance by the kids gives a manufacturer a shot at a lifelong customer and casts a slightly more hip light on the rest of the company's cars. And if you just can't stomach a car on which the roof extends all the way from the windshield to its tail, there's a variety of like-priced, similarly performing cars with trunks (see "Budget Banditos," C/D, November 2001). We would have included in the test a 163-hp Mini Cooper S, but one was not available.
Sedated by several numbing hours of air travel, we relaxed. Or we did until we landed at LAX and a PR guy for Ford stepped out of the shadows and intercepted us before we could get to the baggage claim. Could this also have been a coincidence, arriving as he did utterly bedraggled, as if he'd just driven across the continent nonstop? And what was the message of his leaving a neon-pink plastic-skeleton key fob in the car we would drive? Was this a veiled threat?
No time to consider this as we had a date at an In-N-Out Burger stand just off the freeway to Palmdale, smack in the middle of freakin' Nowhereville, California. Then the topper. Luxuriating over a few Sprites in our Palmdale hotel's bar, we notice the place is filthy with Germans. They're everywhere-looking conspicuously, how should we say? German. Young ones. Attractive ones. Ostensibly, they are here to make a movie called My Daughter's Tears about a woman convicted of killing her child-your typical light-hearted German fare. But could this be anything but an elaborate plot on the part of Volkswagen (is it not German, too?) to sway our choices by the most prurient means.
Make no mistake. We shall not be swayed. (The German women were attractive, but sullen.) Ours is a resolve hewed and then thoroughly shot-peened through a lot more than a year of professional car testing and attendant creative indolence. We would test these cars on the racetrack. We would test them on mountain roads and on expressways and past the strip malls of the great country of California.
And we did so under the oddly reassuring cover of a B2 stealth bomber calmly gliding over us near El Mirage dry lake-looking like a triangular, flat-black hole in the sky. Duty drove us south. There we were free, my fellow Americans. There at La Casa del Zorro-yes, that's the name of a desert resort-we would find solace, solitude, and an Olympic-size lap pool. There we would define the new world order free of the clutches of the evildoers, or at least we'd pick a winner.
