Recently, as colleague Wayne Batty made some routine additions to our buyers guide, the 0-100kph stats of the Hyundai H-1 van caught my attention. It caught everyone’s attention. But only because it managed to complete the chore in 13.18 bleeding hilarious seconds. By today’s standards that’s a terribly long time. It certainly brought a smile to my dial, if only momentarily. See, I recalled an age where that sort of performance was reserved for far more exotic metal. The car I remembered achieving it amicably was the mid-engined Fiat X1/9 and that was an Italian sportscar, albeit a rather underpowered one, for heaven’s sake.

In its prime that sprint figure was something to shout about. Today, not such a big shout. It’s the same everywhere else. We recently lamented the dire 115kW powerplant in the new Kia Koup, but ten years ago when I had that on tap in my Opel Astra I called it a race car.

A few months ago photographer Peet Mocke and I made a pilgrimage to Mossel Bay to snap shots of a bona fide muscle car that was born and bred in South Africa – a 1983 Ford XR6 Interceptor. In its heyday it was a riot that rocketed to 100kph from standstill in 8.6 seconds and topped out at 195kph. Wow! That’s pretty much on par with today’s Hyundai Sonata 2.4, which is not exactly a performance benchmark.

This phenomenon has been observed elsewhere too. Recently Misters Clarkson, May and Hammond from England recorded a mint Aston Martin DB5 doing a lap around their test circuit at a time of 1:46 seconds. They’ve since managed to go a full second quicker in a 2005 Chevy Optra. If I was Aston Martin I’d pay a lot of cash to keep that sort of thing quiet.

As a laaitie I remember looking upon my uncle’s whip as a sort of supercar for the Cape Flats, capable of crushing infinitely more exotic metal. That’s if the talk around the braai was to be believed. The stats sheet reflects a harsher reality because the car in question was a Ford Capri 1.6 and only managed a quarter mile time of 19 seconds. Imagine the sheer embarrassment of it all. You’d be laughed off the stage line today. Fuelled by brandewyn (as opposed to the treacle their auto counterparts were obviously running on), my uncle and  his peers all swore to reaching the mythical 300kph figure under dubious circumstances (imagine a downhill stretch of tar late one night, sans witnesses). Then there were countless traffic light grands prix wherein their hero car had trounced this, that or the other.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good tale. Shocking, isn’t it? And where will it all lead? What I can say with a degree of certainty is that the astounding 4.2 second 0-100 figure we posted a month or two back in the Nissan GT-R will probably be well within the domain of the Golf GTI Mk12 we’ll be piloting in 20 years’ time (if such excesses are allowed under restricted conditions, of course). Take this as precedent: Lamborghini’s V12 Miura is widely regarded as the first and most important supercar, yet today its 6.7 second 100kph time is matched by a 1600cc Mini Cooper in JCW trim. Alas, expect an equally exponential price rise.

So what have I done with this new-found knowledge, this epiphany of performance? Simple. I’ve bought myself a 27-year-old sports car! It’s a 1983 Celica Supra and it’s slow, heavy, noisy, and that’s not where the similarities between us end. Zero to hundred? You know, I think we managed that once. But oddly for me, I haven’t gotten around to naming her yet but only because I can’t decide between ‘Turtle’ and ‘Panda’.

STOP PRESS: The new Fiat Linea has just managed to muster a 16 second 0-100kph dash. Equally dashed is my theory (sigh). So it seems new cars don’t always have the edge. Roll on Celica…