The make-over process by which a humble and innocent, common or garden hatchback becomes a road-monstering, race-ready "hot hatch" is not a mysterious one. You take a standard, entirely likeable, small family runabout, such as a Citroën Saxo or a Fiat Punto, and bolt on lots of obnoxious bits - aerodynamic foils, thick plastic spoilers and skirts, comically spiky alloys, etc. Apply a coat of metallic paint in an especially taste-challenging shade and, hey presto, a vehicle that was once about as aggressive as a hostess trolley is suddenly ready to rock. (You may also make alterations to the suspension and the engine, but those kinds of things are trickier, and therefore optional.)
It's the kind of transformation you could pull off at home, had you the time and inclination. But given that, by and large, you don't, the car companies will do it for you, and spin the result as a breathtaking new addition to the existing range.
Despite being based on the Rover 25, the MG ZR was born to be a hot hatch - or, as you might prefer to refer to it, a supermini. This is its function in life and, as a result, you don't climb in and immediately sense that, just beneath the hot hatch's surface, there is a lukewarm hatch trying to get out.
The ZR is, in effect, a sports car for people who don't want a sports car's costs and discomforts. It shares a few features with the company's popular two-seater MGF - not least the cutely retro white clocks on the dashboard - but is actually less baggy and altogether punchier to drive. MG claims it has never before made a compact sports saloon as powerful as this, and, driving around in a state of nervous astonishment, with my neck pinned to the headrest by the G-forces, I wasn't about to quibble over this. If you want a car that will hold a fairly large number of supermarket carrier bags but will also enable you to travel sideways across gravel during a weekend rally, then the ZR could prove a clever option.
The car comes in three- and five-door versions, and with a range of snappy engines, topping off with the ZR 160 version, which has a variable-valve 1.8-litre engine as well as two wide-bore exhaust pipes, all the better to menace the speed cameras with. At the same time, I appreciate that the car is from the MG Rover stable, and that it therefore manages a compromise that I have seen before in the MGF. As with the two-seater, you get the fun of a close-ratio gearbox, in which the gears are a mere tap of the hand apart from one another, yet not at the expense of cosy suspension and generous insulation.
This is a format that won't frighten or alienate the regular driver with no ambitions to hurtle through a forest at 90mph while a navigator screams panicked instructions from the passenger seat. Indeed, Colin McCrae would probably find the ZR about as muscular and threatening as a mug of Ovaltine. But for those of us who don't drive fast for a living, the car has excitements and comforts in the same cunning package.
There were a couple of key things I would want to change immediately about the version of the car that I was loaned, starting with the colour. To call it banana yellow would be to perform a cruel disservice to bananas. Actually, the official term for it is "trophy yellow". Again, trophies could sue. You need to be particularly careful to get the colour choice right with the ZR because the car is covered in it, without relief, from bumper to bumper and at all points in between, apart from the parts that are glass. And there are bold "tributes" to the colour inside the car, too - which in this case meant big patches of yellow on the seats and yellow trim around the carpets. There is, surely, only so much yellow a person can take.
Secondly, I would want to rip out the hi-fi, a bizarrely fiddly Kenwood number, standard to the range, which seemed to have been created for operation by trained mice (not supplied). Lacking small enough paws and the necessary physics degree, I was unable to prevent the radio from giving me, at great volume, automatic traffic updates every 10 minutes or so.
The irritation of this was not diminished by the fact that, in the great tradition of automatic traffic updates, these announcements unfailingly related to problems on roads at the other end of the country from the roads I happened to be driving along at the time. Not only for this reason, a prospective ZR owner should think hard about taking the hi-fi upgrade, thus securing something with a CD player in it and, if at all possible, 35 or so fewer buttons.
