Skoda Fabia 130 review – 175bhp hot hatch to battle the Mini Cooper S

The small hot hatch market has been looking a little barren of late but Skoda’s wading back in for 2026 with the £29,995 Fabia 130. Ford’s Fiesta ST and Hyundai’s i20N have followed the Renault Sport Clio and Peugeot 208 GTi in bowing out, but the 175bhp Fabia 130, a replacement for the long-discontinued Fabia vRS in all but name, is here to take on the Mini Cooper S and Volkswagen Polo GTI.

Though a celebration of Skoda’s 130th birthday and a nod to the classic 130 RS rally car, I’ll bet you assumed the Fabia 130 has 130bhp. Nope. It’s actually got 175bhp, and a very useful 184lb ft. The name, then, does it a bit of a marketing disservice in the uphill struggle that is justifying £29,995 (only £1420 less than the 204bhp Polo GTI) for a Skoda Fabia.

The Polo GTI is the obvious car for comparison, though key mechanical differences mean the Fabia 130 isn’t a Czech re-skin of Wolfsburg’s smallest remaining performance car. There is no EA888 2-litre turbo motor, the Fabia instead using a fettled version of the 1.5 TSI unit, the EA211 Evo2. The extra power comes courtesy of a tweaked engine map increasing boost from the variable-turbine-geometry turbocharger.

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Hardware changes are intended to improve durability, given the 130’s more enthusiastic use case, and include hardened roller-rocker arm pins, charge air pipes and an intake manifold made of more heat-resistant plastics, plus a chunkier vibration damper. The new parts aren’t bespoke, rather borrowed from other more powerful versions of the EA211 not usually found in Fabias. Nonetheless, the 175bhp EA211 is exclusive to the 130. 

Certainly bespoke is the new rear exhaust muffler, with acoustic flaps and easily removable decorative tailpipes. There’s no manual ’box, the Fabia 130 instead making do with the ubiquitous seven-speed DSG, complete with a bit of sporty mapping work. There’s also a more lenient middle setting for the ESC. 

The Fabia 130 gets bespoke 18-inch wheels with Continental SportContact 5 tyres and sits on the Fabia Monte Carlo’s 15mm lower ‘sport’ suspension, retaining passive dampers rather than adopting the Polo GTI’s dual-mode adjustable items, which seems a little mean given how close they are in price. The steering calibration has been tweaked in terms of weighting and is changeable, along with the throttle mapping, through the Eco, Normal, Sport and Individual driving modes, though the ratio goes unchanged.

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The 130 sits well, the tops of the front wheels pointing inward of the arches just a degree. Additions for the 130’s exterior include a new spoiler, splitter and diffuser, which Skoda claims (with a straight face) contribute to a reduction in lift and improved balance. Completing the look are some subtle red and blue 130 decals, a nod to the aforementioned rear-engined rally car of the late-’70s and early ’80s. So far, so warm hatch. 

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Jump inside and more subtle sportiness meets familiar high quality. The seats have a bespoke 130-spec pattern and a nice hugging shape, though you can't get as low as you'd like. There’s fake carbon trim across the dashboard and a red tint to the digital instrument cluster when in Sport mode. A word of appreciation for Skoda’s steering wheel, which is almost too posh in appearance for a hot hatch – more Superb Laurin & Klement than Fabia vRS.

What is quite Fabia vRS is the performance. Skoda claims this is the fastest Fabia ever thanks to its 142mph top speed. The 0-62mph time of 7.4sec falls just 0.1sec shy of the last Fabia vRS (discontinued in 2014) too. How does it feel? In 2026, not very quick, although it is noticeably peppier than that other notable new affordable performance car of recent months, the £40,000 Honda Prelude coupe.

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The gearbox with its revised software holds revs longer, rev-matches better and upshifts with more of a ‘kick’, though any brisk drive yields an overriding feeling that the whole experience would be enhanced with a manual gearbox to go with the ‘proper’ handbrake.

The engine surprises initially with its pleasing urgency and response, its full torque figure arriving from just 1500rpm and working with a kerb weight of just 1196kg. In spite of the 1.5’s still-modest output, you can feel that the wick’s been turned up, even if only a little bit. It’s slightly quicker to rev, and with full torque available from just 1500rpm there’s a bit more surge as it builds towards peak power, the full 175bhp available between 5750 and 6000rpm. 

It’s not an engine that really sings or revels in higher revs, the power dropping off ahead of the 6500rpm red line. The new back-box offers only a little more in the way of a voice, too. Nonetheless, it’s a motor that’s warm hatch-worthy, one that offers a little more punch from a planted right foot and a little more of a feeling of enthusiasm, even if it’s not as barrel-chested as the Polo GTI’s 2-litre. It’s a sweetheart rather than an outright thriller.

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The Albufera Natural Park along the coastline south of Valencia is strewn with of all things, rice paddies, feeding the voracious local appetite for Paella. The sweeping roads streaking between are our first opportunity to explore the Fabia 130’s dynamics.

The balance of compliance versus refinement in the passive suspension setup is acceptable. The two-stage Polo system would have given more options and a bit more rebound control when you really lean on it, but the standard dampers certainly don’t ruin the experience. Turn-in is keen, with appropriate weighting at the wheel, if not much texture or feel. 

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The 130’s fundamental balance leans on the side of safety and understeer, but a lift of throttle or a bit of trail-braking can activate the tail through faster, sweeping bends. Brake feel is reasonable, as is the calibration of the travel, though the performance from the Monte Carlo-sourced 276mm (front) and 230mm (rear) discs isn’t standard-setting.

The sprinkling of upgrades befit the short window Skoda’s engineers were working with – only seven months from ideation to the beginning of homologation, with development first beginning in November 2024. Skoda insists this is as far as it’ll go too, with no full vRS waiting over the horizon.

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That’s a shame, because with more time to fully realise the potential, there’s a punchier car with real hot hatch character within reach that would allow the Fabia 130 to come alive. There’s a flicker of it in the 130, and you sense that with more time and budget, the engineers would have loved to have extracted more from the Fabia. What they have achieved in the timeframe they had and the resources available to them is impressive. This doesn’t make what could have been any less tantalising.

Price rivals and specs

The Fabia 130 will be limited to an extent, with an asking price of £29,995. That puts it perilously close to Volkswagen’s £31,415 Polo GTI, which as aforementioned brings two-way electrically adjustable dampers and a 204bhp EA888 2-litre turbocharged engine to the party. It’s no superstar hot hatch but it's undoubtedly punchier for the money.

You could also look to Mini and its range of warm and hot hatches, the Cooper S and Cooper S JCW. The Cooper S has 201bhp and is priced a hair lower than the Skoda, from £29,265. If it were better, it’d be a no-brainer. The JCW is priced from £33,265 and boasts 221bhp. There are no exceptional stars of this segment left – the Fiesta ST and i20 N are now off-sale. All the same, the Fabia 130 looks a minnow by comparison to what is left at its fairly serious asking price.