24 Jan 08
There's a new-shape Renault Twingo in metallic orange on our tail. Its driver can't believe what he's seeing. We arrive at a roundabout, squirt the whole way round to leave it the way we came in, and the Twingo is still there. This will be something to tell his friends later. He chased a Peugeot 308 RC Z on a real road. He really did.
Make that the 308 RC Z, because there's only one. As far as the world is concerned it's a glamorous concept car built to sparkle on a motor show stand, which it did first at Frankfurt last year. To see it out in the big wide world, being driven with vigour, is something else altogether.
For me, the driver, it's a similarly unreal experience. Here I am in charge of the only car of its type in existence, but there's no magic forcefield around it. Just be careful, OK?
Coming out of that roundabout I give the accelerator a firm push. The engine note deepens and hardens, there's a little tug from the steering and we rocket back the way we came. Up through the gears, snick-snick - this is a new six-speed gearbox whose shift is as sweet as the current Peugeot five-speeder's is sloppy - feel a very slight pause each time I re-accelerate before a rich surge of torque pours onto the road.
You may have seen the specs of Peugeot's shapely concept coupe, its take on the Audi TT idea. Those specs include a 218bhp version of the 1.6-litre turbo engine that Peugeot shares with BMW. Up to now the top production power has been 175bhp, as used in the 207 GTI and the Mini Cooper S, and it's easy to pluck any figure out of the air when you're applying it to a concept car. You've seen the blurbs; so many concept cars promise a new world of technodazzle but are in reality no more than a glass-fibre mock-up which may or may not move under its own irrelevant power.
