There are definitely some people on here who have had a Valver or Willy before a 172 - even some whove had a 172 and now a Willy!
I dont rate Evo, but they reckoned that the Willy handled better than the 172 in their mega hot hatch test where they crowned the Willy the best hot hatch ever. Seeing as the Willy was a special edition of the 16v, I cant see the Valver being far behind.
The problem with all this talk of handling is that its all so unquanitifable. You talk about speeds, acceleration timings and power all day long...but handling is not quantifiable. I shudder when I see people like Evo making a quantitative figue for handling (I think its called an Evo Performance Rating) where they take things like lap times and G-force into account. Im all for making things easy to understand, but I dont think you can turn it into numbers. I prefer some good old despcriptive text - that tells you what handling is like on the limit and how comfortable it is.