CRUISING ALTITUDE
SOFTER SPRINGS REDEEM AS WE CLOCK 1000KM ON THE HUME
TOURING ability is essential for the modern sports car. With the best roads, racetracks and hillclimbs often in the middle of nowhere, long hours behind the wheel are usually necessary. And whether they leave you relatively fresh at the end – or with ringing ears and homicidal urges – depends entirely on your vehicle of choice. Today, that’s our Hyundai i30 N DCT long-termer which we are going to fire up the Hume Highway from Melbourne to roughly Wangaratta and back, a 1038km experiment to find if the experience is more Qantas First Class or Backwater Airlines Economy. Our first moments behind the wheel of the i30 N are, with the prospect of many hours at the wheel ahead, cause for mild concern. Deep and snug bucket seats might hold you superbly in the twisties, but firm padding threatens over the hours to anaesthetise muscles you didn’t know you had. The first hundred metres in the i30 N, too, reveal a seriousness within the chassis that, while kinda cool, is omnipresent – a harshness from stiffly side-walled tyres and from suspension bushes felt to be made from the stiffest polyurethane available. A body that seems torsionally stiff like it’s got a full touring car roll-cage also tends to have a bit of an amplifying effect. Luckily, though, despite the slightly elevated levels of vibration and harshness, there is a softness to the suspension itself providing an unexpectedly lovely ride quality that redeems massively – and somewhat saves the day. The new twin-clutch automatic, too, is excellent around town, as smooth and clever as you’d want it to be. There is an eagerness to get away from a standstill that takes a bit of getting used to; take a bit of pressure off the brake pedal and the clutches start engaging straight away, the car aggressively creeping whether you wanted it to or not, but otherwise we couldn’t fault it. Out on the open road, despite stretches of coarser bitumen booming
into the interior like the speakers are blasting static at a rude volume, the i30 N acquits itself satisfactorily as a freeway tourer. It’s the little things that make life easier, like the speed displayed nice and clear in the centre of the instruments; same for the distance-to-empty. There’s also blind-spot monitoring so you don’t crash into that dill in the grey car that’s matched your speed off your five o’clock; cruise control that’s easy to use (if not of the radar type) and lane-keeping assist that, delightfully, is easy to switch off via a steering wheel button. A nice little feature is the ability to set the one-touch indicators to blink three, five or even seven times if you want. (On the Hume, I’m a five-blink kinda guy – Victorian drivers need plenty of notice.) Apple CarPlay (or Android Auto) also makes it easy to navigate podcasts, music and Google Maps via the centre 10.25-inch touchscreen. Meanwhile the six-speaker stereo was more than happy to turn ‘All That She Wants’ by Ace of Base into unsociable quantities of decibels (it’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it?). These help make up for an interior that’s a bit $17,990 driveaway – although to be fair, the bits that you do touch the most like the seats and steering wheel are a contrast in how nice they are. As you’d expect from something with 206kW and 392Nm, overtaking is pretty easy… although the turbo needs a bit of notice if you’re low in the revs and when the power does arrive – quite suddenly – the thing wants to jettison itself into oncoming traffic. It’s a turbo lag and torque steer party like it’s 1999. Fuel economy is more than good enough to rival airfare prices Sydney to Melbourne. A full 50-litre tank should, in theory, give about 750km range at the claimed 6.5L/100km extra-urban consumption, and the i30 N will take 95RON. The best as-tested, general consumption we’ve got so far is 8.3L/100km but with some actual effort would drop considerably further. Without a doubt, the i30 N has compromised a lot of comfort for performance – but not by that much compared to say, a regular i30 (if the springs were stiffer, it might be a different story). And it’s performance you’re more than happy to ‘pay’ for, especially when you arrive at your far-flung road or racetrack and hit that ‘N’ button on the steering wheel. This is a proper driver’s hot hatch as we’ll explore in coming issues. So for now call it Qantas Premium Economy, or Backwater Airlines First Class – with a few chickens in the overhead lockers.