WELCOME BACK, SEAT CUPRA R

WITH some badges you just know that you’re in for a treat, with a car developed to give great performance wrapped in a practical package. Think Ford and RS, for example, or Vauxhall and VXR.
These are cars which have to deliver the goods because manufacturers or the better ones, anyway know the value of maintaining the hard-earned reputation of those badges and the premium customers will pay for them.
As with all good reputations, it takes a long time to earn and one incident to destroy it and in the case of this type of car, it’s better not to do it all than to do it badly.
So, it’s been a while (four years in fact) but we should all welcome the reappearance of the famous Cupra R badge on a hot SEAT. SEAT began making hot versions called Cupra (short for Cup Racing) but then the Cupra R models took another performance step from that.
The Leon Cupra R ticks all the boxes. This is seriously powerful, with 265 PS on tap from its 2.0 turbo engine. To go off on a slight historical tangent, a Ferrari 328 which was considered a supercar 25 years ago, mustered `only’ 280....
Against contemporary rivals it does impressively well. That four cylinder engine develops 350 Nm (Newton meters) of torque from just 2,500 rpm which bodes well for great acceleration. Compare its output to 193 Nm for the Honda Civic Type R GT, 230 Nm for the Lotus Exige 1.8 S or even 322 Nm for the 3.2litre V6 Alfa Romeo Brera.
Against the stopwatch, the Cupra R needs just a whisker over six seconds to get from rest to 60 and will go onto a top speed some way north of 150 mph on an autobahn only, of course!
As with all these cars of course, it has to look the part too and the Cupra R doesn’t disappoint. It has all the expected styling bits and pieces twin, central exhausts, a rear diffuser to clear up the airflow leaving the back of the car and so reduce drag, extended rear spoiler, 19 inch alloys and of course, just in case anyone misses the point, some `R’ badging and, this being SEAT, some bright, eye-catching colours.
With pricing from around £25,000 this is a lot of car for the money. A quarter of a century ago to buy this kind of performance you needed something from Porsche or Ferrari. Today it’s yours in a practical hatchback.
Welcome back Cupra R