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The opening page of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch has the couple waking up on Saturday morning. She asks him dreamily, 'What are you thinking?' He knows what he should say, but secretly he's remembering an Arsenal goal.

We all let our personal passions leach into areas of life where they oughtn't be. In arranging my honeymoon in Italy, I spent ages ensuring the rentacar was a Lancia Ypsilon. I just had to know what it was like.

In a year's time, Lancias stop being foreign-holiday curios and once again become part of the British market. That's when we get the RHD version of this new Delta. I think we can look forward to it. For a start, it's certainly going to add some visual variety to our roadscape.

Look at the slim LED tail-lights, the tapered cabin, the shield of a tailgate, the roof (black, whatever the body colour) that levitates mysteriously above the C-post. It was shaped under Mini and Ferrari designer Frank Stephenson, though he's since parted company with Fiat.

Even on home turf, Lancia is coming out of a lean decade. All its medium and big cars have been stagnant for years, so all that's left are the little Ypsilon and Musa. Even though Lancia hasn't been able to afford to lavish the attentions of engineers or designers on them, sales are up this past few years, most recently on the back of a dealer revamp and new adverts - including, by a massive stroke of luck, three starring Carla Bruni, filmed just before she suddenly became Mrs France.

Lancia's strategy now is to make sure all its cars are different from the herd. Not just in looks. The Delta's proportions are different too. Though this is based on a Bravo platform - making it a Focus competitor, albeit with tendenciesto social climbing - it has a stretched wheelbase, giving it masses of space.

You can also slide the back seat forward to swell the boot. In fact, this stretch makes it look a little odd in photos taken from 20 yards away and dead-on side, but when did you last look at a car that way?

A bigger problem is that back-seat space has never sold many mid-size cars: Fiat Croma, Seat Toledo, Skoda Superb, Vauxhall Signum, Renault Vel Satis... you see where this is going. I put it to Lancia's gratifyingly frank boss Olivier François, and he agrees with surprising readiness. But they looked ugly, he says. This is stylish.

Then he can't stop himself pointing out some of the Delta's other points of difference - mainly the technologies, among them LED lights, low-CO2 engines, a next-generation ESP and options of a self-parking system, adaptive dampers and a lane-keeping system that actively nudges the steering wheel when you drift onto the white line. He's also chuffed to remind me that Delta is the mathematical notation for signifying difference.

It feels quite smart to sit in. The quality of plastics around the lower console is a bit variable, and there are some howlingly gimcrack pieces of velcroed-on cloth attached to the parcel shelf to cover the modesty of the folding/reclining rear-seat mechanism. But the seats are lushly upholstered, and the strongly three-dimensional design of instruments and switches gives them a lift.

The ride is far too strongly three-dimensional if you've pressed the sport switch on the adaptively damped model. It pogoes through corners. Leave it in normal, and there's a better fluency. On the straights, when the dampers relax even more, it's really quite supple, though big bumps will force their way through to a sudden bump-stop.

Through corners, it clings on gamely, and the new ESP system does as advertised. So much so that you can steer it like a mutt, and it feels OK; sadly, trying to steer it with grace and sensitivity leaves it still feeling just the same - there's little reward for your skill. Oh, and in the diesel, the brakes are over-servoed and the gearbox is a bit lumpy.

This diesel is a 1.9 with two turbos and a lively 190bhp. Despite the pair of puffers, there is still lag at low revs, but it sounds quite petrol-like and revs freely to its red line. The petrolis the 150bhp T-jet turbo that I've always enjoyed so much in the Bravo and Punto Abarth. There's also a 120 1.6 diesel, a 1.9 and a new 165 2.0. On the petrol side, a brand-new turbo direct-injection 1.8 will kick out a tasty 200bhp.

Us car-heads might remember, but most Britons have probably forgotten Lancia's previous presence here. Good thing too: exclude the Integrale, and all you had were dull-lookers, flakily built and sold by feckless dealers. François says he knows it'll have to do better this time. Well, the car ain't perfect, but it's good enough. The crucial bit is whether they can build it properly, and treat the customers right.

Paul Horrell