Not just street-legal, but street-driven — 1500 miles between 5 strips for Hot Rod Magazine’s Drag Week. Watch out for the tyres deforming in the burnout, the positively erotic* sound of it idling as he backs up for the run, the blue fire shooting out of the exhausts as he holds for launch, and how he winds down after the run. :)
See vids of him cruising the other strip on Autoblog.
* I realise I may be in a minority here. I will have that Pro-Street E34!
The first Ka came out in 1996 and stayed in production for 12 years. This is the StreetKa variant.
SportKa by Flickr user CoreForce
It’s a Marmite car, you either love them or hate them, there’s no middle ground. I fall into the former category, despite my general dislike of Ford; probably because of that in fact, since they go against the general bland Ford grain. Ok, it’s a chick’s car, but so are Minis and Beetles old and new, dinky little Alfas, and rocketship Daihatsu GTtis, and you still want one of those, right?
In 2008, they replaced it with this… thing:
MK2 Ford Ka by Wikipedia user Thomas Doerfer
Now that is a Ford. The one above is a trendy, sporty version, and it’s still crap. It’s like the inbred bastard child of a Yaris and a Suzuki Ignis. It’s like a MK1 Ka that was shoehorned into a slot between two bread vans by a bad driver*. The first car I drove was an 850cc 3 cylinder narrow-ass two-slots-on-top toaster of a car called a Daihatsu Domino, and it was still cooler than that thing.
I don’t know what the average lifecycle of a car model is these days, but with midlife refreshes it has to be at least 6-8 years, meaning it has another 4-6 years in production. And let’s be honest, you’re not going to improve this narrow, boring exercise in drab with a midlife refresh; unless of course it’s performed with a mallet.
And then, this year, some whizkid in a design studio came up with this:
Ford Start Concept via Autoblog
Again, this is just two years after the MK2 rolled out. What I want to know now is, given that this has to have been rolling around in said whizkid’s brain for a while now, why the fuck didn’t they skip the usual concept bullshit, and just build that? That ain’t just a chick’s car like, anyone’ll buy it. It’s perfect for the current market.
But hey, that’s Ford for you.
* Yaris’ and bad drivers, there’s a Venn diagram. Might as well add Skoda and 3 series drivers in for good measure.
