Driven: Seat Leon Cupra R

We take the fastest Seat ever for a quick spin

This is the new Seat Leon Cupra R, the company's new hot hatch flagship. It's the most powerful roadgoing Seat ever and also - just possibly - represents the coming of age of the Seat hot hatch.

Over the past couple of decades, Seat has slowly been building a reputation as a purveyor of surprisingly decent hot hatches. There was the first Ibiza GTi, with its strong VW Golf-sourced engines and terrier-like handling. The 180bhp Leon 20VT was a surprisingly rapid tool, too, while the first Leon Cupra R was a genuine cut-price alternative to an Audi S3 (albeit two-wheel drive).

But fast Seats have always been, broadly speaking, point-and-squirt machines; the entries for 'finesse' and 'sophistication' have not traditionally been well-thumbed pages in the dictionaries of Seat engineers. But has Seat finally found poise as well as pace?

The Cupra R certainly has the pace part licked. Its 2.0-litre turbocharged motor (which engine fans will recognise as near-identical to the motors that power the Golf R, Scirocco R and Audi S3) kicks out 261bhp and 258lb ft of torque (a useful lump more than the 237bhp, 221lb ft non-R Cupra manages), meaning that the fastest Seat can sprint to 62mph in just 6.2secs and has to be electronically restrained at 155mph.

Those headline figures don't tell much of the story, mind - this is a car with a relentless, linear shove, with the sort of in-gear poke to make overtaking streams of slower cars frankly a doddle.

As for poise, the Leon has always been a reasonable handler, thanks to a modern MacPherson front, multi-link rear suspension set up, but faster versions have traditionally suffered from rather uncouth manners. The Leon Cupra for instance - the previous range-topper - had a nasty habit of spinning up an inside front wheel out of tighter corners, or of skipping across the road under hard out-of-corner acceleration, almost a front-wheel-drive version of axle tramp.

Fortunately for Seat, there are no such problems with the Cupra R, (nor any longer with other fast or warm Leons) thanks to the introduction of XDS, an electronic control system that works with the car's ESP to mimic the effect of a mechanical limited-slip differential, without the tiresome (and no doubt expensive) task of having to engineer a whole new set of oily bits.

The XDS is quite effective, too. You can feel it tugging at inside wheels out of tight corners and, although it's not as instant as a mechanical LSD would be, and does interrupt the flow of your driving slightly, there's no doubt that it works, and turns the Cupra R into a genuinely accomplished performer, and possibly the best-handling Seat yet.

The 19-inch wheels also manage to look good (although the ride is a little nuggety), while the Cupra R's claimed 34.9mpg combined fuel economy figure is identical to the slower Cupra's.

Inside you get plenty of kit as standard, including supportive and comfy leather bucket seats (although the gloss-finish plastic backs are not particularly pleasant) and a proper manual gearbox (praise be!), but the general feel of the interior is a bit dark, dated and generally low rent for a £25k car.

Still, that £25,205 price tag makes it precisely £3,100 cheaper than a Scirocco R. That could pay for a lot of track days...

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BelperJim

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