12 Jun 07
Time flies and it's high time I wrote an update on our Peugeot 207 THP 150.
The Peugeot flies as well: the engine has loosened up very nicely, making the 207 a really punchy, effortless overtaker with just a squeeze of the throttle. It's a great engine, apart from the rattle of injectors and/or valvegear when idling.
It took a week away in the Lake District, and the chance of real roads free of traffic and endless restrictions, to discover the depths of appeal I now know the Peugeot possesses. Too much driving on straight roads or at urban speeds had showed up the deficiencies of the steering's character - a clumsiness in weighting just off-centre and no real opportunity to explore the subtleties - but fast, sweeping roads painted a new picture.
The steering becomes precise and nicely weighted when you're enjoying the Peugeot in sporty fashion and you can have a lot of fun with the grip and the torque. There's enough tucking-in of the tail when you throttle-off to make it feel fun and controllable, and, on the road, the fact you can't turn the ESP off above 30mph doesn't really impede things much. This is a properly enjoyable car, which passes the take-it-for-a-blast-for-the-hell-of-it test.
It still isn't perfect, of course. The ride still irritates over sharp bumps and that low-frequency buzz has got worse. It's buried deep down inside the dashboard, doesn't respond to pressure placed on any get-at-able parts and is excited mainly by coarse road surfaces. It's a major dismantling job, I fear.
Perhaps, if the suspension was better at absorbing sharp road edges and filtering out road noise, the buzz would never have surfaced.
