Rally car in disguise...
"It's CROSS-FOUR, not X4!!!!"
I remember a mate of mine used to own one of these. It was white, with generic hubcaps and the clearcoat peeling off. It wasn't an X4, although he'd nicked some X4 stickers and slapped them on the sides. It was a rough old vessel, beat up, under-loved, and over-worked.
Thankfully in GT, we don't need to worry about sunburnt paint, horrid hubcaps and general depreciation. So I bought my car, prepared it as I usually do, and....
...ran out of data just as I was doing my first race...
I gave it a play around in the arcade mode, though, where it displayed incredible pace for a 700cc, beating cars like the Citroen C4, Nissan Leaf, Honda Integra and even a Mazda MX-5!
This is so obviously offline, look! No one's trying to drift...
I managed to race on Saturday though!
I hooked up my PS3 to my mother's phone's mobile data hotspot (Cos she never uses her data, and it rolls over, so she had like 5gb to burn!) and I was glitch-free all night! In fact I'm using that same hotspot to type up this review now!
Against real human opposition, the Sirion remains very competitive and fun to drive, even with nothing but an oil change. It's relatively light and responsive, with good acceleration and a slight tendency to understeer, not uncommon on 4WD cars. It does however, feel a bit babyish. By that I mean it's very forgiving, extremely easy to drive, and hard to lose control. It's almost as if PD made it "
safe to drive" on purpose, providing beginners with a cheap, easy to drive vehicle for them to hone their racecraft in and gain useful racing experience, a bit like a big go-kart, all the while saving enough money to upgrade to an S15 Silvia, Alfa Romeo Brera, Chevrolet Camaro, whatever higher-spec car they want to get next.
A Clio, a Starlet, a Bluebird and even a CZ-3 Tarmac took on the Sirion, but although some beat it, none could lose it!
Something interesting to note that
@Niku Driver HC brought up was the gearbox. The first three gears are nice and close together, 4th and 5th are pretty long in comparison. Not stupidly long, but long enough to notice. This means if you're in 4th gear and you lose some speed by grazing a wall or something like that, shift immediately back to 3rd to keep the boost flowing and the power up there, otherwise the engine will bog and you'll lose a lot of ground.
Off road is where the Sirion shines brightest. Being a base rally car, it is no doubt at home on the rougher surfaces. Once again it displays amazing pace considering the small output and generally low-end stats, and on Saturday Vic in a Sirion kept up with Asher in a CZ-3 Tarmac with
a gap of only 0.2 seconds between them, testament to the Sirion's sleeper abilities!
WRC this ain't, but for 13k you can't complain!
Speaking of sleeper, this car is the definition of that word. It looks completely boring, completely unassuming, completely bland, and yet it will completely embarrass modern WRC base models! As
@CORRUPTEDDISC mentioned earlier, maxed out this thing puts out
340bhp, which is phenominal for an engine less than half the size of any other rally car in GT. Even the Renault R8 Gordini only puts out 313bhp maxed!
Deep Forest.. The perfect combination of tight'n'technical and fast'n'flowing!
It's a sleeper, no doubt. It may well be the sleeper-iest of the sleepers! It's got brilliant handling, loads of grip, is easy to drive, and quick off the mark!
👍 The Sirion is proof that power isn't everything. Sometimes a well setup handling package, lack of weight and acceleration of forced induction is all you need to have fun and go fast!