Buy One Of The Silliest Vauxhalls For A Fraction Of Its New Hot Hatch

Vauxhall is back in the game of performance cars, albeit in quite a different way from what’s come before. The electric Mokka GSE is here as its new sub-brand focuses on making EVs somewhat fun, and we were left feeling fairly receptive to the new approach in a recent test drive.

Yet, it lacks a key element of what has made many of Vauxhall’s best performance cars memorable, and that’s just a bit of silliness. You only have to look at years of the overpowered, hilariously torque-steery Corsa and Astra VXRs as examples of its in-house efforts, as well as rebadging bonkers Holdens to borrow some lunacy from its former Australian cousins.

The ‘00s were the heyday of the VXR brand, with those three letters finding a home in some very unexpected places. Like, say, on the back of a seven-seat MPV.

Ah, yes, in case this one somehow passed you by, the Vauxhall Zafira VXR was once a thing. A seven-seater SUV introduced in 2005, with the 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine taken from the more contemporary Astra VXR. Bonkers.

That meant 237bhp and 236lb ft of torque sent through the front wheels, and with a six-speed manual gearbox to play with too. 0-62mph came in 7.2 seconds, and it could go on to a top speed of 144mph. Maybe not all that impressive today, but remember, this was a mid-’00s Zafira.

Helping to manage its newfound power was IDS, an electronic suspension system designed to stiffen or soften things up depending on how yobbish you were feeling in that particular moment.

Was it any good? Well, based on reviews of the time, not particularly. It suffered from torque steer, a firm ride despite the trick suspension and a general sense of “Why on earth would anyone want a seven-seat VXR?” Yet, there’s no denying it was a little bit of a hilarious thing, and one we suspect has aged well if you were to revisit it today.

It wasn’t completely dead-on-arrival, selling well enough to register in the consciousness of the UK buying public and eventually getting cheap enough on the second-hand market for poorly-modded examples to be a regular sight at McDonald’s car parks.

Is the market beginning to appreciate the few good ones left, though? We’ve found two for sale at the time of writing, and this 2008 example at £5,995 has caught our eye. Maybe yours too, if you can look beyond the debadged tailgate and wind deflectors.

By our math, that’s a ‘not incredible but hilarious, silly VXR’ for a sixth of the price of a ‘decent but not very silly GSE’. We know where our money is going.