With a whopping 256bhp, Mazda’s 3 MPS is the most powerful hot hatch this side of the Ford Focus RS which costs nearly £6000 more.
It looks fast as well, with bonnet scoop, flared arches, spoiler and smart alloy wheels adding up to a handsome, muscular package.
Top speed is 155mph and, more importantly for real-world driving, 0-62mph comes up in a swift 6.1 seconds.
You can tell a car is properly fast instead of just nippy when it’s capable of pinning you in your seat under hard acceleration, and the Mazda does just that.
The only problem is that the front-wheel drive struggles to cope with all that power. Put the foot down in first, second and (in the wet) even third gear, and you can feel the steering wheel jitter in your hands as the front tyres try to deal with the load going through them.
Traction control prevents things becoming too bad, however, and if you ease off just slightly the car travels far more smoothly while still being very rapid.
Underneath the bonnet is the 2.3 litre turbocharged engine that Mazda has in the past used for the 6 MPS and the CX-7 the latter of which is now, more sensibly, fitted with a diesel. Look out for a road test of that in a few weeks.
As well as being stormingly powerful, it’s also handily flexible, pulling well from little over 1000RPM.
There’s enough grip that you’d have to be seriously stupid, or driving on icy roads, to get into trouble, and the brakes haul the speed down quickly and effectively.
Ride quality, not normally a strong point for hot hatches, is one of the Mazda’s trump cards. It’s firm-ish of course, but just about absorbent enough to convince you you’re riding in an ordinary, comfortable family hatch.
It dealt quite nicely with everything from the pothole-strewn street beside my office to a motorway journey to Glasgow and the lovely roads to Crianlarich for a day’s hiking.
Inside there are part-leather seats and a good level of standard equipment that includes a six-speed manual transmission, electric windows all-round, 10-speaker stereo and parking sensors.
There’s sat nav, but it’s a pain to use. You can only control it via buttons on the steering wheel meaning passengers can’t input destinations and the screen is tiny.
Quite unusually, I managed to better the car’s official fuel economy figure of 29.4mpg, with the trip computer telling me I averaged 32.5mpg during my time with it.
I enjoyed the MPS. It’s brutally fast, yet returns reasonable economy and is easy to live with on a daily basis.
Given that Mazda are consistently among the top manufacturers for reliability, it shouldn’t offer too many problems to live with on a long-term basis either.
Price: around £22,295.0-62mph: 6.1seconds.Top speed: 155mph.Economy: 29.4mpg.CO2 emissions: 224g/km.