New Suzuki Swift Sport (2012) again, but with photos and detail

2012 Suzuki Swift Sport - properly revealed ahead of Frankfurt

The 2012 Suzuki Swift Sport as revealed last month with a single image and a paucity of detail. But now we get more photos and a bit more detail.

With Frankfurt rapidly looming we’ll be getting waves of reveals over the coming days (keep that coffee pot bubbling – long days coming), and today’s first offering is a slightly more extensive reveal of the 2012 Suzuki Swift Sport than we had last month.

The Swift has become a properly decent little car, and we’ve been looking forward to the arrival of the new Swift Sport. Mind you, we were looking forward to it more when we thought it might get 180bhp of Polo GTI goodness under the bonnet.

Sadly, it soon became clear that was more a wish than a reality and the new Swift Sport has to make do with just a small stable of horses more than the old Swift – a whole 10bhp more.

But never mind, the new Swift is better than the old Swift and the new Swift Sport also gets some tweaks to the suspension as well as a new six-speed manual ‘box. So even though it only has 134bhp to play with it should still be a bit of a hoot.

Those suspension tweaks seem pretty thorough, with increased spring rates and added rebound springs, more toe-in and increased sideways rigidity in the torsion beam bushings making for a stiffer, sportier setup and hopefully some extra chuckability.

Suzuki are busy telling us that the ‘new’ engine in the Swift Sport has an ‘impressive’ 134bhp, but we’re not overly impressed that they’ve only managed an extra 10bhp. But that’s probably because we expected more, rather than it being a poor effort per se.

But at least that extra hike in power – accompanied by a modest, but not to be sneezed at, extra 9lb/ft of torque – hasn’t meant poorer emissions and economy. In fact the contrary is the case, with emissions dropping from 165g/km to 147g/km and economy improving to 44.1 mpg from 39.8mpg.

Which is all very fine and dandy, even if it all seems much less than we’d expected. Still, we’re sure the new Swift Sport will be huge fun and a decent price.

The 2012 Suzuki Swift Sport goes on sale in the UK in early 2012