The Old Suzuki Swift Sport Is Now A £4750 Big-Fun Bargain

The new Suzuki Swift Sport is upon us, and while the other Matt wasn’t blown away by it, I’m probably the world’s biggest fan of the old one. That tiny footprint with wheels far out in the corners, sharp steering and light weight made it more chuckable than a tennis ball.

Its engine was a peach, too - a fizzy and characterful 1.6-litre normally-aspirated four-pot with 134bhp. It was the throttle response I always loved first and foremost: massage the right-hand pedal and it would leap forward like a big, daft puppy who’s seen a rabbit.

It was a car that made you laugh, that made you forgive it for its scratchy plastics and that made you love it – at least it did once you got over your automatic desire for more straight-line speed. With so relatively little power on tap you could often find space to go flat-out, slinging that zingy little engine all the way to the redline again and again.

You felt like you sat on that roller-skate profile rather than in it, but the way it went around corners was incredible, even on relatively narrow 195-section rubber. It was a car that brought the best out of good tyres, the body leaning just enough to help communicate what was going on throughout the chassis. I loved it. I still love it. I’d buy one. Team CT of yesteryear even ran one for a few months.

A quick hunt around the classifieds shows that this 2012-2018 generation is starting to drop below £5000. Priced at under £14,000 for the three-door when it was new, it’s an exercise in minimal depreciation. Losing £1500 a year in value may not seem great, but some executive saloons almost lose that every month in their first year on the road.

Anyway, the cheapest we found was this one, at £4750. Black wouldn’t be our first choice but this 2012 three-door has a reasonable-sounding 90,000 miles behind it. There looks to be a little minor kerbing to one or two of the wheels, but the Falken tyres are A-rated for wet grip. At least, the identical ones in a different size on Dave the Octavia are.

The trader selling the car hasn’t troubled to clean the seats up, so they need a good seeing-to with upholstery cleaner. The paint could no doubt use a machine polish and then a few coats of a seriously expensive wax.

But this looks, essentially, like a promising little hatchback that could give you tonnes of fun whether you’re driving it to college and back, or stepping out on a sunny, summer weekend morning for a blast. With 10 months’ MOT left and no advisories to worry about, what’s not to like?