SEAT LEON CUPRA BUYING GUIDE
The Cupra and even hotter Cupra R Leons are engaging to drive, underwritten by Volkswagen Group reliability and priced from £600 used. John Evans reports
The quickest Leon on sale today, the Cupra 300, doles out 296bhp and covers 0-62mph in 5.9sec. Rewind 14 years and its hot-shot grandad, the Leon Cupra R, could manage only 221bhp but, being slightly lighter, was only around half a second slower. It gets better: in fivedoor form, the new car costs £30,455, whereas a last-of-the-line 2005-reg Cupra R with 107,000 miles (and also five doors) will cost you just £3000 (see ‘One we found’, p79).
Whatever their differences, hot Leons have always been interesting, especially the way some of them have embarrassed their posher Volkswagen Golf GTI housemates. Such was the case with the standard Leon Cupra (or Leon 20VT as it was first known) that arrived in 1999. Alongside it, and from behind the wheel, the Mk4 Golf GTI seemed dull. It can’t have hurt the Leon that one of the colours it was offered in was canary yellow.
This lowest-powered Cupra was propelled by the VW Group’s 177bhp 1.8-litre 20-valve four-cylinder engine, breathing through a Garrett K03 turbocharger and driving the front wheels through a six-speed manual gearbox. It was fun (0-62mph in 7.7sec) and understated but what really got people talking was the 207bhp Cupra R that arrived in 2002.
It trimmed half a second off the Cupra’s 0-62mph time courtesy of twin intercoolers and a larger K04 turbo. Just as important, it gained more powerful four-pot Brembo front calipers, a set of 18in wheels, quicker steering and stiffer suspension. It looked the part, too, with its humpgrazing front splitter. Rare is the R whose splitter isn’t splattered.
People flocked to it – only for Seat to reward their enthusiasm one year later by replacing it with a 221bhp version capable of 0-62mph in, some reports said, 6.5sec. Still, if any Seat owners were miffed, VW and Audi owners must have felt worse since, priced at £17,000, this more powerful Cupra R cost the same as the distinctly unimpressive 148bhp Golf GTI and £7000 less than the S3.
It wasn’t as though they could draw any comfort from driving better-made cars. True, the Leon’s poorer-quality door seals have come home to roost in the shape of water ingress that can cause musty smells and floor corrosion, and maybe the trim is a less well anchored, but that’s it. Assuming proper servicing (oil changes at 10,000 miles, cambelt and water pump at 60,000 miles, engine hoses replaced around 100,000 miles) and careful driving (allowing the turbo to warm up gently and then cool down before switching off the engine) the Cupra R and standard Cupra have proved to be resilient.
Back in the early noughties, Seat’s interiors lagged behind the brand’s sunny image of itself. The Cupra’s is no exception. It’s a dowdy affair but at least there are sports seats and air conditioning (climate control on R versions). Not a lot, granted, but buy a good Cupra or Cupra R and you’ll be enjoying yourself too much to care.
of punch back then, and the Cupra R still feels pretty muscular today. You have to wait a second or two for the turbo to spool up, but once it does, the boost is delivered with a hefty wallop that fires you onward right up to the redline.
For all that, though, there isn’t quite the spine-tingling excitement you might expect, and part of the reason for that is the lacklustre engine note. Neither loud nor mellifluous, the Cupra R’s exhaust does little more than convey the gases away from the engine. Sound, it would seem, has not been given a second thought, and that renders the sense of acceleration purposeful, rather than downright exhilarating.
It comes down to this: the Cupra R is every bit an early 2000s VW performance product: fast, enjoyable, competent, impressive even, but lacking in that final dash of sparkle that the best performance cars have. That said, it gets far closer than most of its stablemates, thanks to the intense shove the engine delivers and the tenacity of the chassis.
What’s more, the Leon is a fantastic day-to-day companion. Quite often, these older hot hatches can have their usability compromised by stiff suspension or booming exhausts, but not the Cupra R. It is, in short, the car the Mk4 Golf GTI always should have been. And today, it’s available for a bargain basement price. Hard not to be tempted, isn’t it?
Hot Leons have always been interesting, especially the way some upstage the Golf GTI