Now, as we all know, looks are a terribly subjective thing. The readers of FHM magazine last year voted Anna Kournikova the world's sexiest woman, and I find myself in the tiny minority who believe she looks like a younger, slimmer and slightly more girlish Boris Yeltsin. Bailey is of course entitled to express his view, just as I am entitled to say that he has clearly been hallucinating. The pretend-rivetted wheelarches on the Proton Satria; the baseball-glove stitching on a TT Roadster's seats; the half-timbered wheel in a Jaguar S-type; these things are truly, buttock-clenchingly naff. The ZT-T isn't in the same league. To my eyes it's handsome and well-judged. What's more, just about everyone else I've canvassed is a fan.

Yu and Bailey do have a point, however, about the ZT-T's performance - 187bhp is barely enough for a shopping car these days, and those V8-engined MGs are desperately needed to give the marque an uplift. You really have to work the 2.5-litre V6 hard, and it's all too easy to fall out of the power band. But the longer you drive this car the more you realise what a thoroughly competent device it is. There's real bite, real alacrity to the chassis' responses. Whenever I'm tempted to take the long, twisty way home, the ZT-T always feels well up for it, as they say in Eastbourne.

The downside of the incisive handling has been a less than pliant ride, but now MG has answered that by making the suspension settings of our car the optional 'sports' upgrade, while the standard car gets less aggressive spring and damper rates. Driving one of these latest ZT-Ts back to back with BX02 PZT revealed a generally more supple ride - you can still hear and feel catseyes but they don't make the whole car fidget and thrum. Best of all, the car loses little or none of its cornering poise. Am I still a fan? You betcha.