Test drives on a show loop, and what they are good for

Expect smooth tar, two or three corners, one straight where you are allowed to get to eighty, and a marshal at each end. There will be no corrugations, no potholes, no cambered farm road, no steep descent and no coarse chip surface of the sort that makes most of the Western Cape road network loud. Every variable that would actually separate the cars has been removed, which is why the loop flatters everything on it.

The person beside you is there to answer questions and to keep the car in one piece, and they are generally good company. Use them. They know the car better than any brochure and, in our experience, they will tell you what the common complaint is if you ask it as a genuine question rather than as a trap.

Quite a lot, if you ignore performance entirely. You can learn the driving position properly, under load, with your hands on the wheel and your foot actually working the pedal, which is different from sitting in a static car on a stand. You can find out whether the A-pillar blocks your view into a right-hand bend, whether you can see the kerb when you park, whether the mirror covers the blind spot or just the sky.

You can also learn the controls that will annoy you for six years. Where the indicator stalk falls, whether the aircon can be adjusted without going through two screens, how heavy the steering is at parking speed, whether the handbrake is a lever, a button or an automatic that catches you by surprise on a slope. One lap is enough for all of that, and all of it is permanent.

Cape summer conditions are a genuine test and the show loop will not give them to you, so improvise. Ask for the car to be standing in the sun rather than in the shade before your turn, and when you get in, note the temperature of the wheel rim and whether the vents can be aimed at your hands as well as your face. A cabin that takes six minutes to become bearable is a cabin you will dislike every afternoon in February.

Glare is the other one. Low afternoon sun on a dusty windscreen is the normal driving condition on the N7 and on the R27 heading up the West Coast, and a glossy black dashboard top throws that light straight back at you. Look for a matt dash finish and a long sun visor. If the loop happens to run west in the late afternoon, you will see the problem for yourself in thirty seconds.

Do it back to back, within the hour, and in the same order you expect to drive them in life. Memory for ride quality decays alarmingly fast, and if you drive one car at eleven and another at three you will compare the second car against your mood rather than against the first. If the queue makes that impossible, come back the next day and drive both then.

Keep one fixed test. Ours is a slow right turn across a crest, if the loop has one, plus a hard stop from sixty with both hands loose on the wheel to feel whether the car pulls. Same test, every car, written down immediately afterwards while you are still standing next to it.

A show loop narrows the field; it never closes it. Before you commit real money, get the car for an hour on roads you use. Our standard request is a route that includes a stretch of coarse tar, a speed hump at walking pace, one steep climb and one gravel entrance, and if a dealer cannot allow that, the shortlist has just got shorter.

If you can manage it, take the car up a pass. Sir Lowry's and Du Toitskloof are both within an hour of the city and both will tell you in twenty minutes what a show loop cannot say in a month: how the brakes feel on the descent, whether the gearbox hunts on the climb, how much noise comes in at the base of the windscreen, and whether your passenger is comfortable or quietly holding the grab handle.