Kart-like handling
The Roadster is able to carry its speed more or less wherever the road goes. Rare are cars where you have to lift off, let alone brake, so little for corners.
Many of the prerequisites for kart-like handling are present here, and so it proves. It’s agile and flat through the twisty stuff with, relatively speaking, masses of pure mechanical grip. Decent seat-of-the-pants feel too. It will tighten its line benignly if you lift off but this is not a car to flick the tail out, MX-5 style. Its normal handling state is far too neutral for that.
It’s still fun to chuck around without in any way feeling nervy at speed. That’s achieved in part thanks to an oversized steering wheel and surprisingly low-geared steering. I’d like an inch out of the wheel diameter and a quarter turn out of the lock, even at the expense of a dartier feel. A more positive on-centre feel wouldn’t go amiss either. Dynamically, they are my only whinges.
It’ll do 85mph on the motorway if needs must but the radio struggles to drown out the wind noise and clearly this is not its preferred environment. Trucks in adjacent lanes loom up like supertankers viewed from a dinghy.
The ride at motorway speeds is good though, taut and float-free. The pay-off is on lumpy back roads at low speeds. Suspension travel might be precisely controlled but there’s so little of it that potholes are definitely worth steering around.
The Roadster Coupe is a better car with its glass roof panels… off. Yes, this car feels stronger with its top off. With the panels in place bad roads result in plenty of rattles and creaks from above, perhaps not helped in my car by 18 years of use. Put the panels in the rear (they store snugly on polystyrene formers) and the car’s surprisingly good structural rigidity is evident. There is not one shimmy of scuttle shake.