Vauxhall Chevette HS – Car & Classic Drives

The key thing to remember about Vauxhall’s Chevette HS is that it’s not a Firenza HP. It might sound like a silly thing to say, but the parallels are many and varied. All of the familiar ingredients which make the droop-snoot coupé so special are also present and correct in this limited-run Shove-it: the 2,279cc slant-four twin-cam motor, the feisty and endlessly playful rear-wheel drive chassis, clickety-clack dogleg gearbox, glittering silver paintwork, deep-dish steering wheel… and it’s even got the same wheels. (Well, kind of – the Firenza had Avon Safety Wheels, this car has the rims from a Chevrolet Vega. But that’s just between you, us, and some bloke at Vauxhall in the late 1970s.)

The genius of all this is that the fundamental ingredients of the aspirational coupé were shoehorned into the hitherto uninspiring hatchback that your elderly neighbour pottered to the shops in… which isn’t as mad as it seems, as the name of the game here is homologation.

There are few phrases that get petrolheads as fired up as ‘homologation special’. Owning one of these marks you out as a connoisseur, someone who appreciates the finer points of motoring. It also means that every drive you take, whether it’s getting up to hijinks down the local lanes or simply popping out for a pint of milk, will be directly linked to the high-octane thrills of motorsport.

Why is this? It’s just the nature of the beast. Homologation cars need to exist in order for manufacturers to meet regulations and be allowed to go racing. The HS was homologated so that Vauxhall could compete in Group 4 rallying, a field in which it found tremendous success at the hands of Tony Pond, Pentti Airikkala and Jimmy McRae. A minimum of 400 road cars were required to meet the regs, although there’s a rich history of manufacturers being blasé about fulfilling such requirements (just ask Ford how many RS200s they actually built, or quiz Ferrari about the 250 GTO); the common consensus is that the total number of Chevette HSs built was closer to 300. They all came in this crisp shade of silver with retro racing stripes, GRP aero addenda and the oh-so-seventies tartan trim. And we all know tartan seats are for winners – the Mk3 Capri 3.0 S had them, and so did the Mk1 Golf GTI and the S1 Lotus Esprit. The fatter the checks, the better.

The spec list really is remarkable too, particularly when you hold it up against the 1.3-litre base models sputtering outside Bejam’s. Developed in conjunction with Blydenstein Racing, the puppet masters above Dealer Team Vauxhall, the HS packs a 2.3-litre slant-four motor with an experimental 16-valve head and twin Stromberg carbs. The 5-speed Getrag ’box feeds back to a rear axle pinched from a Kadett GT/E; the Kadett also donated its brakes. With a kerb-weight a smidge over a ton, its handy 135bhp helps the HS from 0-60mph in 8.8s and a top whack of 117mph.

The car was a relatively slow seller, due to its high price; indeed, some examples were repainted black in a bid to shift them off the forecourt – but to enthusiasts and collectors, these are as capable as they are peculiar and certainly things to be cherished. And fortunately for us, Vauxhall HQ has a pristine HS in its heritage collection, and the cheery curators are eager to let us play with it…

The overriding impression that the Chevette provides for the driver is that it’s a true multi-sensory experience. Indeed, all five senses are catered for – it certainly looks the part with its minimalist old-school chic, it is tactile and physical to manhandle, it sounds like a freshly-rattled jar of angry wasps, and it serves up a variety of interesting smells; mostly petrol, a little aged cloth, some scorched rubber. And yes, even taste is given a workout… those slurping carbs ensure that there’s quite a lot of unburnt fuel wafting about on the breeze, it leaves a tang in your throat. This is the homologation special lifestyle, it’s not meant to be like a normal car.

The rally-tinged aero bodywork and lurid side-stripes promise much, and the experience delivers with gusto. The HS leaps greyhound-like from a standstill, the rear squirming just slightly before the relatively broad rubber digs in, and the engine’s bizarre sound – a fusion of wail, roar, and crashing cymbals – infuses the whole accelerative experience with the feeling that you should be sporting sideburns and a rally jacket. That beautifully retro steering wheel represents only half of the effort required to turn the car, with the other half coming from the rear wheels; it’s not quite as tail-happy as the Firenza, but it’s still extremely easy to take every corner at some degree of sideways-ness. This doesn’t necessarily have to mark you out as a hooligan either, as the Chevette will happily oversteer at 20mph on a dry roundabout, such is its willingness to please. The larger front disc brakes and heavily revised suspension give you the confidence to barrel the thing about with juvenile abandon, before it’s time to open the taps again and grrrrrrowl onward to the next corner for some more tyre-smokin’ sideways mischief. And this is exactly the way the HS demands to be treated – it’s not something to be cosseted, it’s a car developed to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and chucked down country lanes like a ragdoll in a nursery. The more stick you give the Chevette, the greater the rewards.

What’s perhaps most charming about the HS is that it barely even pretends to be a sensible hatchback. Sure, it has usable rear seats and a practical boot and whatnot, but it is essentially a Firenza HP that’s loosely masquerading as a grown-up. It fuses a simmering boy-racer aggression with genuine rally-stage excess. Utterly bonkers, and thoroughly addictive.

Having given the colossally successful Mk2 Escort a bloody nose on the rally stage, the HS ultimately evolved into the HSR, a model nicknamed ‘Plastic Fantastic’ thanks to its GRP wings, spoilers, bonnet and boot. Suspension revisions and detail tweaks were made, and given that 50 evolution road cars were required and Vauxhall had a bunch of unsold HSs hanging about, HSRs were made by either converting existing HSs or upgrading customer cars, which naturally makes an original example like this one all the rarer. The Chevette rally project ended up being canned in favour of developing the Manta 400, which neatly closes the loop of the tale: a hatchback reimagined with the ingredients of a hot coupé, killed off to make way for another hot coupé. The Chevette HS exists as a brief snapshot in time, a necessary chapter of silliness to form a bridge between the sensible road car and the fire-spitting motorsport weaponry. This may look like a Chevette, but there’s a cheeky Firenza hiding inside, fizzing with potent energy which can barely be contained.