Mullet...here I come! (Ford Puma 1.7i 3dr)

Member Name: samclinton

Product:	Ford Puma 1.7i 3dr
Date:	24/04/02 (4987 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Drive style, Looks(no honest)

Disadvantages: Cockpit space

As some of you may already now, I am lucky enough to work for a company that gives me the opportunity to drive many and varied vehicles?from the sublime to the ridiculous! Recently, on one of those spring days when Mother Nature seems to be busy painting the trees and bushes in varying shades of acid green, I had a Ford Puma 1.7 Thunder delivered.

This vehicle comes in a fetching shade of silver with black leather interior and the silver exterior is accentuated with aluminium trim surrounding the centre console and instrument panel inside. It also has a ?sporty? leather steering wheel and gear knob and snazzy alloy wheels. Looking at the vehicle from the outside and from the front the Puma has quite an aggressive looking ?face?(sorry, girly car review?has to be a face:-)) with slanting light and angular front foglights but, dare I say it, from the rear it looks like it has a fat bum. This is due to the rounded body styling and overall the look works, despite looking a little like a ?hairdressers car?. Inside, apart from those items already mentioned, you also have a single CD player, heated windscreen and mirrors (to save getting cold on those frosty mornings) and air-conditioning. It also has ABS, traction control and drivers and passenger airbags as standard.

If you get inside the car, I?m willing to guarantee that one of two things will strike you. Either the door frame if you are over 5?5? or the lack of room in the front if you are under it! As I am a little on the short side, I only have little legs (I mean, they are in proportion with the rest of me but compared to the giants amongst you, I just don?t rate!). This means that I have to pull my seat towards the steering wheel. Now I like to sit as I was taught, arms slightly bent and relaxed. To do this in the Puma and reach the pedals is an effort, not impossible but an effort none the same. My boyfriend, who is considerably taller, has to perform contortions I would not have believe
d him capable of if I hadn?t seen it with my own eyes, just to sit in the thing. And don?t even think about putting a passenger behind him. In our household, the Puma becomes a three-seater car, and you had better hope that the third person is short because the headroom is not all that forgiving. Despite this, or maybe because of, the boot is really not too bad, with enough room for a reasonable amount of shopping, as long as you don?t have a family of four!

So by now, I am drawing you a fairly negative picture. Well scrap that and we?ll go back to the drawing board?we?re about to go for a drive! First things first, let?s start the engine?sounds innocuous enough with a quiet little purr on idle. Depress clutch, engage first gear, apply pressure to the accelerator pedal whilst easing off the clutch and we?re off. Only don?t apply too much pressure because else you are likely to be off a lot quicker than you anticipated! Without wanting to get too technical on you, the engine features Variable Cam Timing which increases torque at low revs and more power at higher engine speeds (Thank you Ford, for putting it so eloquently!). This gives the Puma a 0-60 time of 8.6 (top speed 126-unverified by myself!), maybe not blisteringly quick, but it feels a lot quicker than that when you?re driving it.

I live out in the Buckinghamshire countryside and driving to work is quite an adventure, especially in a Puma. Edging out of my road, I have to accelerate hard as I live on a blind bend. This is when you notice the low down power and the short gearing. I felt like a veritable racing driver just getting out of my village, as you have to change gear rapidly to stop the howling from the engine as it hits the higher revs. Out on the open road, I was able to open her up a little and I reveled in how the engine always felt as if it had more to give, even in fifth gear. The Puma has a strange feeling of weight, by which I mean it felt like it was glued to the r
oad, lending it an air of surety around corners and over humpback bridges. The suspension is quite stiff but this is some thing I quite enjoy as I like to feel how the car is responding (God, I?m beginning to sound like some idiot on Driven!) although on the more bumpy roads you had to ease up on the throttle a little to ensure that your spine escaped intact! Once on a more forgiving A road, you hardly notice the bumps and can just revel in enjoying the ride.

BUT?and there is always a but, you may notice that the old volume control on the radio/cd is creeping up by now because the downside of this low gearing and free revving is that by the time you hit fifth gear, you?ve got nowhere else to go, and while the speedo needle gently climbs upwards, so does the level of engine noise. This happens to the extent that I didn?t drive this car on an almost deserted motorway at any faster than 80, simply because my eardrums couldn?t take it. At eighty, the rev counter was reading just over 4000 rpm, but I had the radio at about 100 decibels trying to drown it out.

Once you?re off the fast roads, your mind does that strange thing?and forgets this because you?re having so much fun throwing it around corners and racing young boys off the lights. As long as you?re not doing any long journeys in it, you learn to forgive it and enjoy the very real fun it brings. Good god, the other day I even had a fellow Puma driver wave at me, how often does that happen with a Ford? And he looked like he was having the time of his life too! So how bad can they be, unless you?re a six-foot speed freak (just checking whether you read the rest of the op to understand the reference!). So, if this is a ?hairdressers car? I?d best get me off to college and get training!

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