MEET THE FAMILY
Four cars are cornerstones of the Cupra’s back story. Dan Prosser drives each of them to divine the key traits of the sporty Spanish bloodline
IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE A MORE APPROPRIATE ROAD ON WHICH TO GET TO KNOW THIS IBIZA
The Montserrat mountain range that peers down upon Barcelona is the site of an 11th century Benedictine abbey and a vertiginous cable car that carries tourists from the base of the mountain range to the ancient monastery high above. What the guide books don’t tell you, though, is that roads that snake through the shadows of those jagged peaks are as good as any you’ll find in all of Spain.
The two Seat hot hatches that sit before me now in those same shadows bookend the Cupra story so far. The ice white 1996 Ibiza GTI Cupra Sport 16v was the first road car to wear the ‘Cup Racing’ moniker, while the silver Leon Cupra 300 beside it, two decades the Ibiza’s junior, represents the here and now. For all that separates the two cars – technical specification, power output, size and, of course, age – there is one common thread that connects them as directly and as manifestly as the thick metal cable that runs from the base of these mountains to the top.
This is the story of Cupra, told with the help of four of its most significant and intriguing road cars. We’ll catch up with the remaining two cars later in the day when we drop out of the mountains and head instead towards the Mediterranean coast, where we’ll find a location that’s even more spectacular than this morning’s starting point. For now, though, we have some of the best roads in Spain and two or three hours in which to get acquainted with the car that started it all.
With its white multi-spoke wheels pressed out towards each corner the Ibiza Cupra looks pert and compact, and almost small enough to pick up with one hand. For an entire generation of rally fans the Ibiza Cupra will have a certain significance quite apart from being the first Cupra showroom model. For them, it will always be known as the roadgoing version of the Ibiza Cupra Kit Car that lit up the world’s rally stages in the 1990s.
To help establish its new performance sub-division amongst a global audience, Seat had entered the FIA 2-Litre World Rally Cup, a support series to the World Rally Championship. The rules stipulated frontwheel-drive cars with naturally aspirated engines, so these were machines that lacked the outright power and traction of the top-spec cars of the time, but in the right conditions – a dry tarmac road with endless twists and turns, for instance – were only marginally slower. On occasion, in fact, the F2 cars were actually faster.
The sight of those compact, high-revving F2 machines being flogged on asphalt, gravel and mud by drivers as fearless as they were talented soon earned the FIA 2-Litre World Rally Cup a devoted following of its own. The Ibiza Cupra Kit Car emerged as the class of the field. As you can read on page 56, it won the series for Seat at its first attempt in 1996, then repeated that success in 1997 and 1998.
It took only a few short years for Cupra to earn itself a stack of trophies and a dose of authentic motorsport pedigree, while the Ibiza Cupra was shown to be a competition proven hot hatch almost from day one. The motorsport workshop at Seat’s Martorell plant, which was where those Ibiza Cupra Kit Cars were built and maintained two decades ago, is less than 10 miles from where I’m stood today. I may not have a titlewinning rally car in which to tear along the Montserrat mountain roads, but the little Ibiza Cupra hardly seems like a short straw. Like its rally counterpart it has a naturally aspirated 2.0-litre engine that thrives on revs, and it also drives its front wheels while making a virtue of its tiny footprint and minimal weight.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate road on which to get to know the Ibiza Cupra. The surface is marble smooth and the lanes are wide, which means you can pick the path of least resistance through the curves without straying across the central white line. There are only short straights and almost endless twists and turns, too, so the car’s relatively modest 150bhp never seems to hold you back.
What it lacks in outright power the fourcylinder motor more than makes up for in its hunger for revs. Keep it spinning between 4000rpm and the redline at 6800rpm and there’s good straight-line shove. Soon enough you learn that the conservation of momentum is absolutely key; keep the motor on song, use all the grip the front tyres can muster, don’t scrub off too much speed with the brakes and you will clip along very smartly indeed. You know you’ve got the Ibiza Cupra worked out when you feel the inside rear wheel hang in its wheel arch bend after bend, the car three-wheeling itself across the tarmac in the archetypal hot hatch pose.
The chassis has the sweetest natural balance, too, and on the way into a corner you can feel the outside rear corner propping the rest of the car up, which helps to keep the front end pinned to a tight line. The Ibiza Cupra doesn’t zip between corners with the rampant pace of a modern hot hatch, but it is enormously entertaining to drive and rewarding with it.
From our elevated position in the Montserrat mountains, 1000 metres or so above sea level, we should be able to see the town of Sitges on the coast some 26 miles away. This morning, though, the view is lost in the haze. Almost immediately due south from where I’m standing is our next destination, a haunting old place just outside Sitges. There, a couple of dozen miles away
and four years further down the line, we’ll find our next Cupra.
When you first see the banking several hundred metres off in the distance you would swear the ground had been ripped up and folded over by an earthquake. There’s just no way, you think to yourself, it can possibly have been designed that way. Autódromo de Sitges-terramar is one of the oldest purposebuilt race circuits in the world, having been constructed in 1923. It’s roughly an oval with two long straights linked by long, sweeping banked corners, which to the eye look close to vertical at the rim. In fact, they’re banked at 60deg – too steep to scale on foot. The circuit is exactly two kilometres in length.
What’s so unusual about Terramar is that it seems to be frozen in time. Having held a grand prix the year it opened, the circuit quickly met with financial trouble and soon fell into disrepair. It was used sporadically up until the 1950s, but it hasn’t been developed since the day the gates were first flung open. It has baked in the sun for close to 100 years and the concrete is crumbling in places,
MORE RECENTLY TERRAMAR WAS A CHICKEN FARM. TALK ABOUT FADED GLORY
but Terramar is more or less the same now as it was way back in the Roaring Twenties.
I’ve never seen a place like it. Once upon a time, right here, brave young men risked their lives in hopelessly unsafe cars just to prove they were the fastest. But more recently, Terramar was a chicken farm. Talk about faded glory. It was back in 2012 that double World Rally Champion and homegrown hero Carlos Sainz set a new lap record for a Red Bull publicity stunt, clocking a time of 42.6 seconds in a modern GT3 racing car.
Sainz, driving as fast as he dared and with almost a century of advancements in motorsport engineering on his side, trimmed a scant two seconds off the previous lap record, set by Englishman Louis Zborowski 89 years previously.
On the crumbling start/finish straight, in the shade of a gnarled tree, we find our next car. The Leon Cupra 4 arrived in 2000, four years after the original Ibiza Cupra. At the time this 201bhp Leon was the most powerful Seat yet produced, but what really marked this car out was its six-cylinder engine and four-wheel-drive powertrain. It remains the only Cupra to use anything other than a four-cylinder motor and one of only a small handful to drive both axles.
Having been sold only in a limited number of left-hand-drive markets the Leon Cupra 4 is a lesser-spotted car these days. It looks very subtle when you first lay eyes on it, but the longer you stare the more muscular and purposeful it seems to become. The engine is a 2.8-litre narrow-angle V6. The two cylinder banks are so tightly pressed together that they actually share a cylinder head, meaning the engine is unusually compact. In fact, it’s a packaging masterstroke: a conventional V6 just wouldn’t fit beneath the Leon’s bonnet.
With plenty of power and traction the Cupra 4 launches to 62mph in 7.3 seconds and on to a top speed of 145mph. The engine is magnificent. Throttle response is instantaneous, it pulls eagerly through the mid-range and zings around to the redline, sounding rorty and red-blooded as it does so. The seating position is just about spot on, too, the seat itself being mounted low in the car, its wingback bolsters clamping you in position.
You need all the lateral support you can get while driving around Terramar’s pair of sharply-banked corners. If you enter either of the bends too slowly you immediately feel the car gently scudding down the slope, the tyres unable to find enough purchase to keep you up there near the rim. You actually have to steer quite aggressively against the banking just to keep the car on course. With a little more speed, however, the car presses itself against the concrete and holds a high line, and above 60mph it will actually steer itself around the curve.
takes a leap of faith to carry any meaningful speed into the banked corners. You worry that you’ll go in too quickly, pop out over the top of banking – there’s no guard rail whatsoever – and fly into the knotty undergrowth beyond it. That never happens, of course. You simply sweep into the bend with no loss of momentum and peer up at the banking directly ahead of you, the car heaving up and down on its springs as it traverses the bumpy, undulating surface.
With the entire world canted over at a 60deg angle, track rushing from the top of the windscreen to the bottom, you feel less like you’re arcing around a banked turn and more like you’re driving headfirst into an enormous loop-the-loop. The first half-dozen times you also swear the car is only moments away from tipping over onto its roof and careening down the slope. I simply cannot imagine what it must have been like to race around here in exposed, top-heavy and openwheeled 1920s machinery.
The early 2000s was a time of adventure for the Cupra brand. Not only did it build the Leon Cupra 4, mechanically the most unusual car it would ever create, but it also swapped rally stages for race tracks. The factory entered the European Touring Car Championship in 2003 and the British Touring Car Championship a year later. The team won the British series outright in 2006 and clinched the World Touring Car Championship in 2008 and 2009 (the European series was elevated to a global one a few years previously). Smooth Tarmac may have replaced rough gravel, but those Cupras were still winning.
From the charming and unusual Leon Cupra 4 we now take the biggest leap forward in time, all the way to 2009, and the most sizeable stride forwards in terms of engine power and performance, too. The Leon Cupra R is the first turbocharged car in our quartet, but at the time of its arrival Seat had already been turbocharging its highperformance cars for a full decade. This was the car, though, that set the company on its way to building hot hatches that boasted the performance and handling agility normally excepted of purpose-built sports cars. The Cupra R’s 2.0-litre turbo motor was rated at 261bhp, enough for it to scrabble to 62mph in just 6.2 seconds and push on to 155mph. Make no mistake: the Cupra R was a profoundly fast car in 2009.
In fact, this was the car that made me realise just how rapid a really well-sorted hot hatch could be. I vividly remember driving one along a swooping Sussex B-road and thinking I would need to be in something red, Italian and extremely noisy to travel any faster. Nine years have passed since then, but the Cupra R still feels quick to this day. The motor is sharp and responsive, too, with none of the lag or hesitancy you would expect of a decade-old turbo engine. What’s more, the rest of the car is far from overwhelmed by that wedge of power. The front axle does a good job of transmitting it to the road surface without much wasteful wheelspin, while also clawing huge grip out of the Tarmac when you turn into a bend.
The Cupra R was a springboard. From there, high-performance Seats would evolve and begin to incorporate motorsportit derived powertrain and chassis technology. Electronically controlled limited slip diffs, twin-clutch gearboxes, adaptive dampers, track-focused tyres and so much more besides would soon find their way onto the marque’s fastest and most hardcore models.
It was in 2014 that Seat launched the Leon Cupra Sub8, the first hot hatch capable of lapping the Nürburgring Nordschleife in less than eight minutes. We all sat up and took notice. Hot hatches weren’t playing any more; they were getting serious.
And so we move on to the last of our four Cupras, the 2017 Leon Cupra 300. At the time it was the most powerful Cupra to date, but it was also the distillation of everything the performance division had learned since 1996, the result of competing in international motorsport and building hot hatches that had continually evolved for two decades. This was the outcome; a sensationally quick and thrilling hot hatch, 21 years in the making.
With 296bhp and, in this particular car, a quick-fire twin-clutch transmission, the Cupra 300 can launch from a standstill to
AS WELL AS ALL THE POWER, THE LEON CUPRA 300 IS HUGE FUN TO DRIVE
62mph in 5.7 seconds. For a front-wheel-drive machine, that is staggeringly fast.
Whether on the banking at the Sitgesterramar race track or the flowing bends up in the Montserrat mountain range, the car’s chassis feels beautifully resolved, with pliancy and fluidity over bumps, but also stunning levels of iron-fisted body control and agility. The steering is direct and free of any slack, the tyres grip so hard you think they’re going to peel off the wheel rims and in a straight line, the car feels far more accelerative even than the numbers suggest.
But as well as all that power, precision and performance, the Cupra 300 is also a huge amount of fun to drive. Just as the original Ibiza GTI Cupra Sport 16v was, in fact. And therein we find our common thread, the unbroken strand that runs through all four Seat models.
Since 1996 it has been the case that Cupras have been uniformly fun to drive. That, more than anything else, should be Cupra’s sole guiding principle today, for the next two decades and far beyond that, too.