02 SLOW SLOW AND QUICK QUICK QUICK...

So COVID-19 effectively put a stop to us doing the rally in 2020.  On the plus side, it gave me plenty of time to hunt for vehicles and watch YouTube videos on how to wrap a car at home (more difficult than I imagined as it involved precision and patience, two things that don’t come naturally to me).  

It also let me investigate some of the roads we would be travelling down.  There were long autobahns with sections without a speed limit, poorly maintained carriageways in Italy, and almost vertical, winding mountain passes in Switzerland - all things that a Smart Fortwo, powered by a 3-cylinder, 0.6-litre engine producing 45 bhp and developing 70 lb-ft of torque, will struggle with.  It might be time for a rethink.

After some thought, I decided that the Smart Car was still the funniest vehicle to use, but I needed one with a bit more poke, so I turned my attention to the Smart Brabus, the ‘hot’ version of the tiny city car.

Brabus is a tuning company that takes Mercedes cars and sprinkles them with lunacy.  They turn already powerful machines into fire-breathing, record-breaking objects of desire, and they gave the Smart the once-over!  

They increased the engine capacity to 698cc, which gave it a whopping 74 bhp and a tarmac-shredding 110 Nm of torque.  They fitted a bespoke front spoiler and grille, bolted on side skirts and installed a revised rear exhaust.  To top it off, they threw on some sexy 16-inch Monoblock alloy wheels.  

The changes certainly made the car look better than the standard version but does it go any better?  According to the motoring journalists, yeah, yeah, it does!  The relatively minor tweaks to the engine now mean the little car can hit 60 mph in less than 12 seconds and will hit a terrifying (in a Smart Car) 98 mph.  That is more like it; I will get one of them.

Time for more research.  It seems these little monsters hold their value even better than the standard cars, so I’ll need to be even more savvy to pick one up at a reasonable price.  Some sellers mentioned that the extra work required to stop the car from overheating and seizing had been completed.  What now?  Seizing engines?  Hmmm…

So it turns out that there is an issue with the cars in my price range.  As the engine is at the back and has now had the power boosted, there is a chance that it will overheat and, if left unchecked, give up completely.  This isn’t what I wanted to hear, especially as I planned on taking it on such a long journey in the summer.

From what I read, nothing indicates an issue until it happens.  The best thing to do is deal with the problem immediately, which means even more money.  The little Smart Car was suddenly starting to price itself out of the race.