C O V E R     S T O R Y

I may already be suffering from a mid-life crisis.  I’m no psychiatrist, but consider this: in the considerable number of cars I’ve driven so far, I’ve fallen in love with those which are admittedly targeted for a much older set.  Sure, the Honda Accord, Volvo XC70 Cross Country and even the Ford Expedition are great cars in their respective fields, but they don’t exactly make me feel any younger than my twenty-odd years of existence.

Twenty-three years may seem such a short time, but having been repeatedly warned by friends about ‘getting too old’; I started to yearn for a secret youth formula.  Since I don’t plan to start venturing into the use of leather jackets and tight-fitting jeans, maybe I would start with the car that I drive.  Surely a drop-top two-seater sports car would do the trick, right?  Not unless you live in a different dimension.  Maybe a compact SUV, then?  For all its sporty lifestyle pretensions, it still shouts family man.  Realistically, it would have to be something that’s reasonably priced, easy to maintain but still offering distinctiveness, style and downright naughty fun.  This is the world of the Ford Lynx RS.

It’s hard conserving with a girl, trying to point out what makes the RS so good compared to other Lynxes, and beyond that, the other compact sedans.  They won’t care that the revised bumpers add aggressiveness to the profile or that the 16-inch alloys look spot on in the wheel arches.  Heck, they probably won’t even care about the it having a 2.0-liter engine under the hood.  Show the same car to a bunch of guys, and they’ll do one of two things: admire the car for what it is or they’ll try to race you to prove that their cars are better.  In short, the Lynx RS is a car with a goatee and chest hair.  It’s simply overflowing with testosterone.

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