Once underway, first impressions are positive: the exhaust burbles purposefully, while the racing seats and fat, sporting steering wheel underline the car's sporting intentions

It's been a long time coming, but the serious return of the Abarth marque to the new car price lists has been one of the more welcome events of the past couple of years. Just as Cooper defined hot Minis for a generation and more, Carlo's scorpion-badge set apart some rather tasty hot-rod 500s back in the 1960s – and now Fiat is hoping to repeat the phenomenon with the latest Abarth 500 SS.

But before all you Italian sports car junkies start writing cheques in the name of Fiat, remember that the company's recent hot-hatch form has been patchy at best. However, with the 500, Fiat has been very serious indeed. Ugrades over the standard car are aplenty: a turbocharged 1.4-litre 16 valve T-Jet producing 135bhp provides plenty of motivation, while the addition of anti-roll bars, stiffer springs and dampers, Brembo discs, and suitably-oversized tyres on 17in wheels increase traction enormously.

Outside, there's no way you'd mistake this for the standard car – a body kit toughens up the stance, and all Fiat badges have been slung out, to be replaced by Abarth scorpions.

Once underway, first impressions are positive: the exhaust burbles purposefully, while the racing seats and fat, sporting steering wheel underline the car's sporting intentions. Acceleration is suitably punchy, especially from love revs, where the small turbo really does an excellent job of fattening the torque curve. It sounds pretty good too, rasping away in a pleasingly old-school way.

However, there are questions over the way it feels that we're still struggling to answer. There's no problems with the level of grip, but a continuing bugbear was the stiff-legged damping, which failed to inspire driver confidence on anything other than billiard-smooth road surfaces. The steering was also rubbery and lacked precision or good old fashioned feel. In Sport mode, it was heavier, but no more communicative. Shame.

Despite that, we liked the Abarth 500 a lot. It has heart and soul, and despite the dynamic inadequacies, it's appealing and cool in a way that the Mini Cooper S isn't. It's good value, and well equipped, too. Buy with confidence, knowing that city slickers will continuously cast envious eyes in your direction – committed drivers will probably still prefer to travel by MINI...