TOP 10 INTERIORS
Abarth 695 Competizione Sabelt seats (695 Biposto pictured)
The Fiat 500 has been around for a fair few years now, and there have been so many different spec levels and special editions that it all gets a bit bloody confusing. But one that’s really worth knowing about
is the 695 Competizione – unveiled in 2011, this one had Konis, a noisy exhaust with butterflies, a rollcage, an electromechanical gearbox with flappy paddles, and some of the greatest seats ever bolted
into a Fiat. Designed and crafted by Sabelt, these god-like bum-snugglers had absolutely massive bolsters for both thighs and flanks, sumptuous leather counterpointed by blood-red Alcantara, carbon fibre
shells, and sodding great Abarth scorpions on the windy adjuster knobs. A pretty decent car, but worth buying for the seats alone. And we have to give a special mention to the bonkers Abarth 695 Biposto
too, which had a very similar pair of chairs. (‘Biposto’ means ‘two-seater’, and if your car’s named after its seats then they’re probably pretty good!)Vauxhall Astra GTE digi-dash
The 1980s were a real golden age of futuristic-looking digital displays. Naturally
what was futuristic a few decades ago looks distinctly retro today, but that just
gives the digital dashes of the era an entirely new kind of charm. It was probably
Knight Rider’s fault – all of those eye-popping LEDs and big-digit numbers. Back to
the Future had a hand in all this too. So when Vauxhall put a digi-dash in the Mk2
Astra GTE, it was a real selling point: it had a variety of colours (although mostly
yellow, everything was yellow in the eighties), a huge set of digits in the middle as a
speedo, a climbing rev counter on the right, and your temps, amps and fuel in racy
rows on the left. A fabulous piece of design, and a proper icon of the age as every
modder rushed to squeeze one of these into their own car. There was a time when
every Nova on the scene had an Astra digi-dash; shave off the corners and it’ll go
into a Corsa binnacle, people were putting them in Golfs, Escorts, all sorts. OK, if
you wired it in wrong then the speedo would permanently read 288, but in its own
way that was also pretty cool.