IN THIS FEATURE History of hot hatches Credible on paper Surprising star

In the last 25-odd years since the advent of the modern hot hatch as we know it, there have always been the stars - Peugeot 205 GTi, Volkswagen Golf GTi (Mk 1/Mk 2), Renault Clio Williams - and the also-rans. The most popular examples of the genre haven't necessarily been the quickest, or the best-handling (witness the enduring appeal of the god-awful Vauxhall Nova SRi, or Fiesta XR2i), but have somehow captured the imagination of a generation or two of boy racers, modifiers, tuners 'n' tweakers. Blame it on Max Power magazine, if you like.

Accent MVi - no hoper

Correspondingly, plenty of perfectly decent sporty superminis have been passed over for wearing the wrong badge or simply not having the right image. Take the Renault 5 1.7 GTX, for example (and I did, owning one for five years): quicker in real-life road conditions and much more driveable than the GT Turbo, but sneered at by anyone under 40. Or the utterly bonkers Daihatsu Charade GTti. Or the '80s Honda Civic CRX, anyone? None of these really struck much of a chord amongst performance enthusiasts when new, though as cheap secondhand buys, they suddenly looked a whole lot more appealing. The Charade GTti, like Daihatsu's even crazier Cuore Avanzato TRXX, could even be called a cult car these days. Don't confuse these with the real no-hopers, though: the UK-spec Nissan Sunny GTi, the Hyundai Accent Coupe MVi and not-very-sporting Fiat Punto Sporting, to name and shame just a few, were just plain rubbish.