Hyundai i30 N Performance
As if three flying laps of Silverstone’s full F1 circuit aren’t enough, look who’s driving
Driven at Silverstone
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To determine whether Hyundai’s first stab at a hot hatch can stand up to its more established foes in everyday life
It’s not every day you find yourself on Silverstone’s full Formula 1 circuit. It gets even more unusual when Albert Biermann, Hyundai’s R&D boss and former BMW M development chief, is sitting in the driver’s seat.
We’re in my i30 N long-term test car, helmets on and disclaimers signing our lives away completed, and are lucky to get the circuit to ourselves for half an hour during a break in the track sessions.
This is a car built to handle well on track, Biermann tells me, and adds that this is his favourite car of the scores he’s developed recently. But it’s not meant for highly skilled drivers.
He says: “You can have so much confidence in this car. You can find cars which don’t feel so comfortable and we made a real effort to make the driver comfortable. It’s not about the fastest lap times, but it’s about how confident you feel going into a highspeed left-hander. It was important to me that the car feels planted at the rear. For professional drivers, it’s probably a bit boring, but we haven’t built this car for them.”
Indeed, Biermann tells me that half of i30 N owners it hosted in May at the Nürburgring 24 Hours had never even done a track day before.
Biermann announces early on that he hasn’t driven on the Silverstone circuit for more than two decades. I mysteriously developed car sickness four years ago, so his admission isn’t the most reassuring of starts.
And so we’re on our way, firstly at slow speeds without our crash helmets to get some of the pictures you see here, and then, once the photographer has wisely jumped out and we’ve put our lids on, the track is entirely ours.
“I have no idea where I’m going,” says Biermann, but for someone unfamiliar with Silverstone’s racing lines, he’s doing a good job at judging them and drifting through corners.
After a couple of laps, the tyre pressure warning alarm goes off. If Biermann was preparing the i30 N for track driving, he would have lowered the pressures before setting off. “I would start with 28psi at the front and 31 at the rear. Now the tyre pressure is 43psi – way too much – so I would go into the pits and bring it down to 34psi for a much better balance. Then I’d go out and push it more. Then you need another readjustment. Usually two steps are needed and then it’s resistant.”
What was the biggest challenge with the i30 N’s development? He says he and his team worked on their own electronically controlled limited-slip differential for more than a year. “After one year, I wasn’t sure whether it would ever work well. Then we made really good progress and now I’m really happy with it.”
He’s still pushing pretty hard as we near the end of our three-lap run, when Biermann tells me it would take him around six or seven laps to learn a circuit from scratch: “I start slow. I need to understand the layout and know the sequence of the corners, and then how to place the car for the different sections. Every car has its own balance and load transfer so I have to learn how to work with that.”
As we draw into the pits after a cool-down lap, Biermann proclaims that the circuit “doesn’t have enough corners for the i30 N. It’s too boring, too flat and too wide”.
He says his circuit of choice is the Nordschleife: “It’s a whole different story [than Silverstone]. First of all, I know the track. It has far more ups and downs so it’s much more challenging. You have corners where you go over some hills and you’re airborne and when you land you make the turn. And it’s really fast. It’s the craziest track I know.”
So what did I conclude after our three-lap run at Silverstone? Three things. One: Biermann is a highly proficient driver. Two: the i30 N is a highly proficient track car. Three: I felt queasy for a good few hours.