The hottest Leon ever made
It goes without saying that I’ve been quite excited about this car. There’s a spirit of adventure behind something that looks this good and has lots of power Cue some Big Plans. Seat claims that the Leon Cupra 280 is both more comfortable and more potent than the old, rounded-shaped one. That’s quite a mountain to climb, so I’m taking it to the Alps to see how it measures up.
A 4am start is only OK when it’s in pursuit of great roads in a great car, so I let this one slide and pull into a Shell station for a tank of VPower Nitro+ super-unleaded. Nothing but the finest, and all that.
All the miles between Bristol and the Channel Tunnel are soothed away in Comfort mode on the drive mode selector. The same is true over in misty France. A hot hatchback riding on 19-inch wheels has no right to ride this well.
That comfy ride counts against the 280 in the twisties, though. So, after leaving the toll roads, it’s been Cupra mode all the way, with the DSG gearbox lever flicked leftwards into Manual leaving me to shift with the clickpaddles behind the steering wheel.
It’s sadly not true manual control and will shift up for you at the redline, but the gearing is excellent and in third the Cupra flies like Hermes himself across the countryside, still under the lingering French perma-cloud.
Fuel injection management intervenes on every full-bore upshift, delivering a cheeky bwaarrrp from the twin oval exhaust tips. It pops its way back down the ratios, too, and the Cupra’s four-cylinder turbo engine is soon singing through the northern foothills of the Alps, dropping to first for many of the tighter hairpins and struggling with physics as it wrenches its way out again as quickly as the front tyres can manage.
Up to second, bwaarrrp, feel the front wiggle a little then stabilise, snatch third, bwaarrrp, giggle a little like you’re 10 again and then quickly grow up as you push hard on the left pedal, feeling the Cupra’s brilliant brakes grab hold of their discs and stress the front rubber to the limit.
We’ve escaped the cloud cover, the Leon and I, reeling in the ribbons of warm asphalt with a vengeance. We just don’t have roads like this in the UK. Not even in Scotland are they so well surfaced, winding and scarcely used, designed as it seems by someone with a special fondness for spaghetti. So we continue.
The hottest Leon ever made has come to its spiritual home. The endless tricky bends and amazing altitude shifts are working the exceptionally clever VAQ ‘differential’ hard, but you couldn’t find a more perfect display of its talents.
It’s not a limited-slip differential (LSD), as some people think. It’s actually a set of clutches that control, via carefully managed slip against one another, how much traction is re-routed mid-corner from the inside wheel to the outside wheel. It’s a completely varia- ble system as opposed to a mechanical LSD, which is either on or off.
And boy does it work. The harder you power through a corner, you can feel it get more and more involved, taking you way past the traditional point of understeer. The traction it ultimately delivers through the tortured front tyres is absolutely astonishing, but it demands your full attention to drive it quickly. Lift off with the VAQ system working hard and you’ll just understeer into oblivion. Keep your foot in, keep it working and it pulls you around with barely believable lateral G-force.
The front Bridgestones, meanwhile, are feeling a little worse for wear after the last stretch along the Route Napoleon and the Col de Vence. A quick roadside inspection shows the edges of the still-hot tyres are heavily scarred from their efforts. I could swear there’s less tread on them than there was yesterday...
Still; too late to back down now. The fun doesn’t stop here; the Leon Cupra 280 can guarantee that. Is it both more comfortable and more potent? Oh yes.