IN THIS FEATURE An escaped mutant Carbon fibre tub No doors A hearty bellow

Oh no, has it had some form of accident? Are the occupants OK? How come it's still running? Round a corner is coming half a car, the front half, and it looks every bit as surreal as James Bond's abbreviated Renault 11 in A View to a Kill. But now it's passing and yes, now we can see another wheel which is preventing the truncated tail from scraping on the ground.

Could this be a new take on a Morgan three-wheeler, then? Or is it just a mutant that escaped from Peugeot's R&D department before it got finished? Because its nose is clearly that of a Peugeot: in fact it's the nose, more or less, of the forthcoming Peugeot 207. Meet the 20Cup concept car.

A surprising amount of grip

It's great when concept cars actually work. Making a static model to show how a car could be is one thing, but making a concept car do what it looks like it should do is something else again. Peugeot is good at this. The RC coupés spawned a one-model race series. The 907 - with its V12 engine and Ferrari-like styling - drove like the beast it looked. And now the three-wheeled 20Cup proves that when you have front-wheel drive and all the weight in the nose, the rear wheel doesn't really matter that much.

The 207 itself goes on sale next spring, initially adding to, rather than replacing, the 206, with its top models using a new engine range co-developed between PSA (the Peugeot-Citroën holding company) and BMW. These engines will also find their way into the next-generation Mini and are direct-injection units of 1.6 litres (a 1.4 will follow). There's a non-turbo with 115bhp and a BMW Valvetronic-like system that replaces a throttle with variable valve lift, plus a brace of turbo motors delivering either 141 or 168bhp. And this last engine is lurking under the carbonfibre snout of the 20Cup, to be sampled for the first time.