After four weeks of ‘ownership’, I felt
we’d been ignoring our new Peugeot RCZ R. We’d been eating up the balmy weather
with the Rolls-Royce Phantom drophead, I’d sneaked a week’s holiday and in the
remaining available time none of us had notched up any truly mile-eating trips.
There had been plenty of out-and-back stuff, but no long-haul drives to Milan.
Yet when I checked the Pug’s odometer, I
discovered we’d done precisely 1,223 miles in four weeks, the equivalent of
nearly 15,000 miles a year. Then I remembered the RCZ R’s role in our ‘Junior
Handling Day’ (see p36); the Pug had driven north to Cadwell Park for some
prodigious circuit action and had come back smiling. Once upon a time, you
simply couldn’t expect a decently potent road car to withstand a day’s hard use
on a race circuit. Nowadays, the best can handle it with ease.
The
Peugeot RCZ R is quick and relatively engaging
It’s a matter of record that the RCZ R
didn’t figure in the top half of our Junior Handling Day results. However,
there’s no disgrace in this. We had chosen a field that simply contained no
duffers. Happily, what the RCZ R did display, even compared with the winners,
was a shape that continues to look too good for its price and an engine that
seems to punch out more power than its capacity promises.
For complicated reasons, I missed the
Lincolnshire thrash-a-thon this year, so I was fascinated to see what hard use
does to a low-mileage car. Many owners wouldn’t be too keen to subject their
1,000-mile-old car to 60 to 80 laps on a circuit as demanding as this,
especially knowing six or seven different drivers had been involved. But you
only have to see how today’s cars are tested and developed by their creators to
know that the RCZ R (a car which has already survived the Nürburgring 24 Hours)
would cope well.
The
low roof and swooping roofline doesn't overly inhibit interior headroom
The engine now spins a little more freely,
emitting a delicious rasp above 5,000rpm I swear wasn’t there before. The car
might just be a bit quicker now, too, although we’ll give it a few more miles
before we run it against the clock. The clutch is firm but smooth and there’s a
bit more fluency in the gearchange, but the best improvement is detectable in the
brakes, which have a better initial bite and greater consistency now, because
the ‘green’ pads are green no longer. Ditto the special soft RCZ R tyres, which
are now extremely well scrubbed.
Despite all this, I’m clear the RCZ R is
going to develop in my ownership as a pretty good choice for twisting roads,
made special by the handsome and unusually enveloping seats (whose part-fabric
facings grip you much better than most) and the small, low steering wheel,
which makes it quite brilliant in tight corners.
Upstream
of the big chrome tailpipes, there's a new manifold for the R's exhaust that's
apparently derived from motorsport
Found myself leaning over the fence the
other day at the Prescott Hillclimb (a course with two hairpins in 1,127 yards)
and thinking how well the RCZ R might cope with it, given how easy that little
flat-bottomed wheel makes the car to control in tight manoeuvres. The car
itself may be a bit wide, but I’d definitely like to know the answer.
