Bravo roars up to rivals

FirstDrive: Fiat Bravo: Michael McAleerand Shane O'Donoghueput Fiat's new five-door hatchback Bravo through its paces

It wasn't until we exited the hairpin chicanes of the Balocco test track that we got a clear run at the Maserati we'd been tailgating through the bends. Once on the long straight however, our 1.9-litre diesel Fiat Bravo, laden with four rather well-fed adults, found its legs and overtook the Italian sports car.

Before you get too excited about Fiat's new Bravo and its 150bhp diesel engine, it's worth noting that when we overtook the heavily disguised Maserati Quattroporte coupé, it did have its indicator on. Our 120 horses under the bonnet were also going at a gallop while the 400 or so horses of the Maserati were barely breaking into a canter. The symbolism, however, was not lost on my passengers.

Balocco is Fiat's dedicated testing centre between Milan and Turin, home to a myriad of road conditions and high-speed tracks aimed at putting prototypes through their paces. It was here, along with the research and design offices in Turin, that the Italian firm's latest entrant to the family hatchback market was born. And this was our first chance to see the results of their efforts.

You dare not say that the success of the Bravo is vital to Fiat's future, given the remarkable financial turnaround of the brand in recent years, but the family hatchback market is where the action is at on the European continent.

The first striking feature of the new Bravo is the smooth lines of the body. The car is a modern-day take on the original Bravo, sold between 1995 and 2001. This time though, it's a five-door hatchback.

The front nose hints at styling cues taken from the sports car stables at the Fiat Auto Group, such as Ferrari and, yes, Maserati. That may be more than coincidence - designer Frank Stephenson originally worked as head of design at the Ferrari part of the business before moving to his current role. And his pedigree is impressive, having previously worked with BMW where he designed the new MINI and the BMW X5.

First up was the 1.9-litre 120bhp engine. This we took to the mountains and it never flinched when faced with the steep inclines. That's to be expected, as these engines are already well developed for production sales. A nice smooth gearbox is also a feature of the powerflow and all this is matched with a suspension that's capable of softening the blows, though it remained a little too soft when the going got really rough on the rutted streets of small mountain villages.

That soft sense was also a feature of the steering. While Fiat wanted to retain its "easy handling" feature, the steering was lighter and less informative than we would have liked. The end result is a car that has the looks and the performance, but not the handling characteristics to match.

While the interior is a world apart from the outgoing Stilo in terms of quality, pitting the Italian up against the best of the rivals from Europe, the thick a-pillars are distracting.

Debuting in the Bravo is also a new range of turbocharged, direct-injection petrol engines under the T-JET tag. We got behind the wheel of the 1.4-litre, 150bhp version (there will also be a 120bhp option) and were mightily impressed with its smoothness and performance given the low capacity. The key is a peak torque of 230Nm, produced at only 2,000rpm ensuring that the Bravo feels keen without having to rev the engine. Unfortunately, Irish buyers won't see the T-Jet engines until the end of the year, but alongside the proven Multijet diesels, they could be worth waiting for.

The new Bravo is said to mark an even more important step forward for Fiat than the successful Grande Punto, featuring a new design, new engines, but more significantly, a new way of thinking when it comes to the development of a car.

Fiat's claimed 18-month development time for the Bravo raised a few eyebrows at the press conference in Rome, but Harald Wester (Fiat's Chief Technical Officer) assured us that this super-fast progress has not been at the expense of quality. Indeed, the Bravo was developed for the most part on computer, using advanced simulation techniques and a virtual testing environment to refine and test the car's design before a single component was produced.

Weeks after the first of our drives in the Bravo and we're sat in the Stadio dei Marmi with another 1,700 members of the press awaiting our first viewing of the showroom-ready Bravo. To keep us entertained, Fiat had enlisted the Cirque de Soleil, a highly talented group of acrobats that wowed the audience with unnatural strength, balance and agility.

No doubt Fiat would have liked us to think the same about the new Bravo. However, it was more telling when Luca De Meo (CEO of Fiat Automobiles) told us that when he first went to meet with the performers, he was as impressed by the management of the company and the level of preparation as he was by the live performances.

There is no doubt that Fiat wants us to think that the Bravo, and all future Fiats, will be reliable and of good quality, likening a car's dependability to how a dangerous circus act has to work first time and every time. De Meo admitted that the company has learned from past mistakes.

Though our time in the test car the following morning was limited, it was long enough to know that Fiat has got the basics right. There is no disputing the Bravo's obvious design flair, but added to it we found a comfortable, spacious car that should undercut major rivals such as the Ford Focus and Toyota Auris on price.