Hyundai i30 N review (road & track test) | Auto Expert John Cadogan

Описание: I30 N kills GTI because it offers superior performance at a lower price point. It’s that simple. More grunt for less cash. Maybe not as elegant. Certainly not as minimalist in the styling, no heritage to speak of, and no runs on the board in this domain, but if it’s performance that gets you across the line, objectively, you cannot field a compelling argument for GTI superiority.

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The e-diff and the rev matching - brilliant. And it’s very forgiving at the limit. You don’t have to be race-competent to enjoy driving one on a track, but if you are, you’ll love it.

This is an exceptionally rewarding, fun performance car. The ESC - in sport+ mode - it’s hardly restrictive. It hands you a lot of rope. Like all performance cars, if you’re a Muppet and you crash, it’s not going to be a slow one. Obviously, being manual-only, that’s going to turn some people away.

The in-cabin noises are … they’d say ‘enhanced’; I’d say fake. So I was philosophically pre-wired to hate them. But they actually sound pretty good. Certainly they don’t sound fake - and I guess that’s the acid test of a good fake in every domain: watches, handbags, breasts and now in-cabin ambience…

The exhaust crackle from the bimodal exhaust. It serves absolutely no purpose … except that it makes you smile every time. And I guess that’s enough. Maybe that’s just a character flaw… I’ll add it to the list.
However - and this is a big ‘however’ - I’d stop short of saying the i30 N is a better car than an i30 SR or a Mazda3 SP25 Astina. Better is the wrong word. It’s better if you want a performance car. But if you just want a reasonably sporty car with a bunch of refinement and packed luxury features - the other two are going to be better for you.

In other words, there’s no perfect car, and a lot of the choice is about you. Don’t get talked into an i30 N on the showroom floor, purely on the premise of ‘top of the range equals best’. If you want all the premium features and you’re not gagging to drive around corners on the limit, an i30 SR is going to be better for you. And it’ll save you some cash.

Finally, the glace cherry on the icing on the cake of the Golf GTI’s funeral is this: It’s cool to review cars. It’s cool to be given exclusive access to a race track when a carmaker wants to prove a point. At the media launch in Australia, Hyundai hired the Winton race circuit and invited the press to drive really really fast, and not crash.

It’s generally a meaningless stunt when carmakers do this. Because the minute you do this, as an owner, you void the warranty. In researching this aspect of the report I’ve been told several car companies in Australia enthusiastically monitor Facebook and other social mediums solely for the purpose of compiling a database of track users.

This data is then used to deny warranty claims. And to me, it seems unethical to release a car with track-type aspirations, and market those aspirations to get you across the line, and then operate in this way, under the radar. In short, it’s a mongrel act.

Hyundai tells me - in writing - that if you take your i30 N to a track, your warranty will survive. Hyundai says as long as it’s a non-competition event, which I take to mean a race, broadly, then (Hyundai says) there will not be a Spanish Inquisition on a warranty claim following you driving it like you stole it, for kicks, in a safe, controlled environment, which (as you’ve seen) can be quite therapeutic.

They tell me they will even honour the warranty if you put a set of track performance-oriented tyres on the car, for even more grippy goodness. Try getting a commitment like that out of Volkswagen.

Best thing about the i30 N is you can drive it to the track, blow out the cobwebs without breaking it, emerge like an inverted James Bond martini (stirred but not shaken) and drive it home - without carrying a trailer full of spare parts, or even touching a spanner. If you’re the kind of sick, twisted deviant who enjoys that kind of thing, I feel your pain.

What a terrible affliction.