If you listen carefully, you can hear Acme breathing heavily around a corner.
It will keep pace with most hot hatches from the same era in a straight line, but it handles like a horse on stilts unless you invest some money in suspension modifications.
The Facelift is slightly better as it had revised suspension, but your budget doesn't really allow for one.
They are solid cars if they have been looked after properly, but sadly they are of an age now where they are likely to have been abused at some point. Aside from the usual second hand car stuff, few things to look out for:
- As mentioned above, the seat slider pins can snap, I had to drill mine out on the drivers side and I replaced them with bolts with tapered ends.
- Clutch release bearing chattering on the overrun is common if the kit hasn't been done for a while.
- Oil leaks from the cam cover are common, as are they from a seal on the back of the cam chain cover. Both are easy to rectify by simply replacing the seal and/or the gasket. Check down the back of the block with a torch and a mirror if you can.
- Camshaft flange bolts (lift bolts) get worn and snap which may cause the variable valve lift to stop working, these are easy to change, plenty of guides online. I'd want to give this a look on higher mileage cars. Make sure lift engages at 6200RPM. The early ones are more prone to this issue because Toyota later revised the metal the bolts are made out of, so they were stronger.
- Gearbox whine in first gear is fairly common, but not "normal", be cautious. Mine whined like a straight cut gear in 1st.
- It is quite common for the heater matrix to stop working, make sure it blows warm air.
- The dash separates from the bottom of the centre vents/radio surround slightly, which is annoying.
- The flap on the centre console will almost certainly be snapped off...
However straight line performance is excellent, and you should be able to get 40MPG+ on a run if you take it steady. A combined average of about 30MPG should be easily achievable.
They come with a decent bit of kit as standard too, proper automatic climate control, auto wipers etc...
Other things to consider for 1K.... Clio 172 maybe? Those little MG's based on a Rover 25 are dirt cheap also, and you may get a Focus ST170 in budget too. But really another £500 would go a long way if you can find it.
The practicality requirement pretty much eliminates an MX5 otherwise I'd recommend one of those, out of the other four I'd definitely have the Corolla. Is it the best car all round? Probably not. I'd guess thats the Clio? But this noise!
