No Fixed Abode: The Low Spark Of High Performance Compacts

Imagine a world without war. More specifically, imagine a world without the horsepower war that has dominated the automotive landscape over the past fifteen years.

It’s easy if you try. The Corvette would still have 350 horsepower; mid-engined Ferraris would have about 400. The Mustang? 260 raging ponies. Most pickup trucks would have under three hundred horses, and some would have fewer than two hundred. The V12-powered Mercedes sedans would have just a bit more than half the puissance they currently possess. The Subaru STi would have 300 hp to humiliate the VW GTI’s 200 hp, while the top-spec Nissan Sentra would send 180 hp through a six-speed manual, about which a big deal would be made.

Perhaps you experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance while reading that last sentence. After all, the current Subaru STi has 305 horsepower now, facing the 210 horsepower of the GTI, and the just-announced Sentra Nismo is expected to put out 188 ponies. Compared to their turn-of-the-century ancestors, both of those cars actually have a worse power-to-weight ratio today. And while the new Civic Si is expected to put up a slightly better number than the 2006 Civic Si, it’s going to come from a 1.5-liter turbo engine that will likely be stressed to the gills, not a tuned-down variant of the Type-R’s two-liter.

So, while the wealthy car buyers among us are enjoying an era of unprecedented power in their sports cars, SUVs, and big sedans, the entry-level buyers are being asked to do more with less. Sounds familiar, right?

Thirty years ago, the “hot hatch” was the red-hot segment in motoring both here and overseas. Everybody fielded a warmed-up compact car, and I mean EVERYBODY. From Escort GT to Cavalier Z24 to Corolla GT-S, the hills were alive with the sound of young people revving the nuts off machinery ranging from the tape-and-stripe prosaic to the sixteen-valve exotic. In the UK and on the Continent, drivers were thrilled by a series of sweet-handling small cars from Peugeot, Opel, and Ford of Europe. And in Japan, it was well and truly off the proverbial chain — remember the Honda City Turbo, complete with trunk-mounted motorcycle?

In the decade and a half that followed, manufacturers turned up the heat with a vengeance. The Subaru WRX/Sti and Mitsubishi Evolution weren’t just fast for being compact cars; they were just fast, period. Woe betide the driver of a new 911 Carrera who saw an Evo behind him on a twisty road or a close-coupled racetrack — there was a solid chance that he was going to get a forthright and humiliating lesson in the merits of turbocharged all-wheel-drive small sedans.

But then the horsepower wars started for real, and small cars were left behind. Fifteen years ago, you could throw a $499 aftermarket tune on a new WRX and whip a new Mustang or ‘Vette in the quarter mile. Good luck doing that today. Some manufacturers dropped out of the sport-compact game entirely — Nissan, we’re looking at you — while others were half-hearted (ahem, Honda). While the VW GTI improved by leaps and bounds to become the undisputed class of the field, it didn’t necessarily get any faster while it was doing so. Arguably, only Ford has pushed the envelope in the past ten years — the Fiesta ST is a brilliant car that runs harder than any supermini in history, while the Focus ST was a stout-hearted beast that responded well to chip-tuning. But everybody else has either held the horsepower line or lost interest entirely.

The news from Los Angeles suggests that this trend is unlikely to change any time soon. Yes, you will eventually have the Civic Type-R to join the Focus RS in the hyper-power-hatch segment that didn’t even exist fifteen years ago, but let’s be honest with ourselves: those cars are boutique products, aimed at wealthy Gen-Xers who fondly remember their GTIs or Civics but want to pay Mustang GT Premium money so they can run slightly slower than a Mustang GT.

So who killed the hot hatch or the crazy compact? Every theory that comes to my mind sounds like a stereotypical indictment of either today’s “participation-trophy” generation of young men, or the economy in which said young men are struggling to find work, or both. Perhaps it’s just a matter of engineering resources being pulled in another direction. Small cars nowadays are more likely to spawn tall-roof variants like the HR-V or C-HR than they are to generate fire-breathing Touge-twisters. Somebody with more baked-in optimism than I possess might argue that the increased durability of modern cars is to blame — why would you drop $20k on a warmed-over compact when that same money will get you a 370Z or Mustang GT with 100,000 good miles left in it?

Regardless of the causes, however, I will tell you what the effects will be. Enthusiast-focused small cars are the gateway drug of automotive enthusiasm. Today’s Corvette or McLaren owner was probably a hot-hatch driver at some point in his or her life. If we don’t hook ’em young, we won’t hook ’em at all. Mark my words. It’s a trickle-up economy out there when it comes to fast cars, and if that sounds crazy, how can it be any crazier than selling a “NISMO” Sentra that can’t keep up with the old Sentra SE-R?

[Image: Honda North America]