Tuesday 24th May 2016

Hyundai at the Nurburgring 24-hour

Who's using motorsport to directly influence road cars? Hyundai!

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Despite PH first covering Hyundai's at the Nurburgring back in 2013, plus the WRC campaign, the brand arguably still struggles for true performance kudos. Here is Hyundai's latest step towards a fast road car, the development i30 for this weekend's Nurburgring 24-hour.

Lots of testing and racing being done...

Hyundai says 40 per cent of this car is new, including a newly-developed 2.0-litre turbo engine that's designed as a "performance focused powerplant." Hurry up with the road car! Also of note in the fresh parts are wheels, wings, transmission and dampers. With VW having made such a fuss about the importance of the Nurburgring in setting up the Golf Clubsport S, it will be interesting to see how much from this race car will make it to an i30 N production car.

The i30 2.0-litre will race with two other Hyundai models at the weekend, an i30 1.6 Turbo that's defending a 2015 class win as well as a Veloster. Hyundai claims that the road cars, when they arrive, will be "focused on delivering maximum driving pleasure to true motoring enthusiasts."

It's predicted that the Hyundais will complete more than 4,000km around the Nurburgring this weekend, hopefully providing plenty of data and experience to aid the road car development. Can a fast Hyundai really take it to the hot hatch establishment first time around? Is Nurburgring testing still valid? Could Hyundai win again at the N24? PH will be in Germany at the weekend, more details to follow from the forest!

Watch the video here
 

[DecMcClure]

I'd buy an i30 if it looked like that.

[pmr01]

I really (really) like my missuses veloster turbo but the engine and the Hancook tyres are the low points.

[MustardCutter]

It'd awesome if those arches made it to the production car, though unlikely to do so. It'll need to be something really special or really cheap to make some headway into the overcrowded hot hatch market these days, especially as a first entry for the company into the segment. I supposed the C'eeeeeeed GT sort of counts but it's not really hot and hasn't been heaped with praise in the fun stakes from what I've read.