Out and About - Winter 2021

Out&About leisure

MOTORS

MAURICE HARDY asks could Kia’s Stinger be a future zinger?

W hat next for prewar? screamed a recent headline in Classic Car Buyer magazine. What indeed. When I was approaching my teens, cars like the Austin 7 were barely 40 years old, many much younger. Families ran prewar cars as regular transport. My Dad’s first car, bought in 1964, was a just post-war 1949 Vauxhall Velox that cost £45 at a time when he would be going on strike for £20 a week basic in 1971, even as a skilled aircraft industry worker. You could pick up an old 7 for a fiver and coax it back to life or turn it into a special by skilful wielding of a saw or axe. But these days it seems far more owners want to get professionals to restore or fettle their cars to leave more time to enjoy washing, polishing, and driving. Those three activities represented active car ownership come the 70s and 80s, with cars from that era now the same age as Austin 7s in my early years. So what will the Gen Z people be looking for when they reach the age of having spare cash and a fantasy to indulge? Probably something today’s generation of classic fans will think of as a crazy choice, but then what appeals moves on as enthusiasts mature. So in 20 years time what will draw the eye? Maybe something that quite literally cut a dash on Top Gear or anything else that Farmer Clarkson has done, although probably not a Lamborghini tractor.

So here’s a left field choice for future classic fans to lay down now, like a fine wine. It’s the Kia Stinger. The what? It was an instant hit with TV car shows in 2018, but you’ll need the 3.3 litre V6 version that EVO magazine named its sports saloon of the year rather than the cooking diesel. When it was new, the Stinger 3.3 T-GDIV6 GT S cost £40,495 and could really turn heads, and that’s what many classic drivers want. It’s the “Look at me!” buzz that they covet as much as the cars and our experience driving an early Stinger shows this car has it in spades. Give it another 20 years and there will be Kia cars that people just have to own and the Stinger should be one of them. This company is not afraid of technology and is confident enough to offer a seven year, 100,000 mile warranty on its cars. Give the Stinger another year or two and it will be getting to around the £20,000 mark while still

in warranty. Find a good one, get all the faults put right and then treat it nicely and you’ll have years of fun ahead for less money than it costs to get a mechanically neglected, but cosmetically good, old Jaguar which, let’s face it, needs rose-tinted specs and a fat wallet to keep on the road. That’s why so many fell into the world of bangernomics. Our experience of the Stinger shows what a zinger it is. We drove one up around Banbury during a weekend jolly. It’s just down the road from Aston Martin’s Gaydon factory that’s next door to Jaguar Land Rover and the British Motor Museum. Banbury is also home to Prodrive, producer of the hottest competition cars, so people here expect prototypes and the unusual. Even so, the Stinger was interesting enough to start a conversation in a filling station queue. Not only that, but wherever we went people were

O&A WINTER 2021 misplaced judging by the aptly-monikered Stinger. Pride definitely hasn’t gone before a fall. 85 attracted to it. A guy in an Astra VXR kept overtaking and pulling in so he could get another look and pedestrians actually ignored the tasty Mercedes Benz CLS500 in front to point at the Stinger instead when we drove through Burford in the heart of an area steeped in wealthy people with flash motors. With its 168 mph top speed and 4.7 second 0-60 mph time the Stinger GT S is a true performance car. There’s a 3.3 litre V6 under the bonnet (us old timers would have preferred an in-line six or V8) that lets fly with a delightful growl when you tickle the loud pedal; you don’t floor it because the result would startle everyone within a couple of miles. We’ve also chuckled in the past about car makers using ambitious model names but Kia’s first car in the UK was the Pride, a reworked Mazda 121 past its sell-by date, and that pride was not