Abarth Punto Evo review
by David Finlay (17 August 2010)
Abarth has brought its version of the Fiat Punto Evo to market in the certain knowledge that it will prove to be its least popular current car. Its predecessor, the Grande Punto, found not much more than 200 customers in the UK and was handsomely outsold by the 500. Even if the Punto Evo proves to be a bigger hit, it will still be soundly thumped both by the 500 and the 500C convertible.
And to me this is all rather a shame, because while I'm fond of the 500 I also don't think there can be any doubt that the Punto Evo is by a long way the best Abarth since the brand was resurrected in 2008.
The Fiat Punto Evo is a smart-looking car, and the various Abarth additions to the exterior make it look even better. More importantly, though, this is the first Abarth to benefit from Fiat's 1.4-litre turbo petrol MultiAir engine, which produces a maximum of 165bhp when you rev it hard and performs so well from engine speeds not far beyond tickover that you might mistake it for a particularly healthy naturally-aspirated two-litre.
165bhp is 10bhp more than the Grande Punto managed - at least if you didn't fit the esseesse kit which boosted the output to 180bhp - and naturally enough the Evo is quicker: top speed is up slightly to 133mph, while the 0-62mph time has fallen by three tenths to 7.9 seconds. Thanks to the MultiAir technology, though, there are significant improvements in the official combined fuel economy (up 6.2mpg to 47.1mpg) and CO2 emissions (down 20g/km to 142g/km), which are unlikely to be matched in real life but do at least mean that you'll pay less tax.
Hot hatches are never all about straightline performance, of course, and to demonstrate the Punto Evo's abilities Abarth let the UK motoring media loose on the Teesside Motorsport Complex. I'm sorry to say that this isn't a venue I'd heard of before, but it's quite good fun, very technical, and well worth a visit if you're in north-east England.
The Punto Evo showed up well here. On fast bends it becomes slightly unsettled at the rear - a very useful thing to happen in a front-wheel drive car because it gives you more control over where the car should go next - but when you eventually reach the limit the car switches to understeer, which is as it should be.
Actually I got quite a lot of understeer, but that's partly because most of the corners at Teesside are slow and partly because I got into the habit of not losing enough speed before turn-in. (Translation: I was driving like a plonker. I'm sure you would have done better.)
Track sessions like this are the best way of finding what a car will do on the limit, but there comes a time when you realise that the best place for a road car is a proper road. Over some challenging hill routes in North Yorkshire the Punto Evo proved to be even more impressive than it did at Teesside. It feels completely unstickable at acceptable speeds, it's superbly well-balanced and the ride quality is remarkably high for a hot hatch.
I have to admit that I didn't like the Abarth quite as much as the Fiat Punto Evo GP, but that car is much less powerful and can't really be considered as a rival. Abarth's main problem here is the Skoda Fabia vRS, which has an extra 15bhp and is £800 cheaper, though if it came to a beauty contest the Italian would surely leave the Czech standing.
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