The SC1 is not quick. Those 100 horses do a decent job of moving thissweet little coupe down the road at a moderate pace, but it's not up to
anything much more demanding. According to Saturn, if you wring out all
the performance in there, you will hit 60 mph from stop in 10.5 seconds.
The question, of course, is do you need to get there any more quickly?
If you do, you need the SC2. And you do not need the performance that
goes with the base engine paired with an automatic transmission in any
Saturn. Automatics will work better with the twin cam engine.
The engine, transmission and clutch make a happy threesome. The shifts
are smooth, the clutch is linear, which means there is no sudden engagement
point, and the engine delivers its power in an even--if tepid--flow.
The handling is quite good, we found, with the suspension happy over
almost any surface. Over a favorite piece of twisty road the SC1 could
be persuaded to take on a more aggressive personality if we shifted into
third, and left it there, squirting from corner to corner and dealing only
with the throttle and the steering wheel.