SEAT León Cupra Track Test
by David Finlay (6 June 2007)
SEAT devotes an impressive amount of energy to saloon car racing. It competes with the León in both the World and (with Jason Plato and Darren Turner as its drivers) the British Touring Car Championships, and it also runs the separate Blaupunkt SEAT León Cupra Championship as part of the BTCC support race package.
The Championship is now in its fifth year. Until 2006, it was based on the previous-generation León Cupra R which is still eligible to run in its own relatively low-cost class. But the main action centres around the current model.
The Cupra tested here is a demonstrator which doesn't actually compete in the Championship, but it's identical to the cars that do. Compared with the Touring Cars driven by Plato and Turner, it's significantly more road-based, though that's not apparent as you step into it.
You do this over a driver's door bar which is hidden under carbonfibre shielding (to diffuse the energy in the event of a major side-on impact) and is part of a very serious and - if you're into this kind of thing - rather beautiful rollcage. None of the standard car's interior trim remains, and just about all the major controls are different too; the race-type steering wheel and the instrument display which sits behind it jut into the cabin towards the superb motorsport seat (mounted very low down and very far back), and the pedals are proper race kit too - narrow, hinged at the bottom and with what a road car driver would consider to be minimal travel.
So in what way is it road-based? Well, the engine is the two-litre turbocharged T-FSI unit used in the standard León Cupra and a wide variety of other Volkswagen Group products. Power is up by 50% to just under 300bhp, which is actually more than the Touring Car produces, but it's a couple of seconds a lap slower because of its extra weight (sophisticated suspension and a comprehensive aerodynamic package make it comparable in terms of cornering speed).
The Cupra Championship car also uses a six-speed DSG gearbox. The road car is available with that too, so again we're not talking about a big jump into the competition world . . . but
within that world, where manual transmission is so common as to be not worth discussing, it seems almost freakish. Just above the centre of the steering wheel there's a non-standard button which lets you select neutral, reverse or forward; once you're in the third of these, the system works almost exactly as it does in the road car.
Not quite, though. In this application the DSG has been modified to provide launch control, which caused a bit of a problem in the first round of the 2007 series at Brands Hatch. Other launch control systems are pretty much foolproof to use, but with this one you have to have the correct balance of throttle and brake as you're waiting for the lights to change, and you also need to have warmed up the front tyres sufficiently on the formation lap. At Brands, few of the drivers had this right, and as a result they were engulfed at the start by the older Cupra Rs. With the right technique, the modern Cupra has since proved to be much quicker off the line.
I didn't try a standing start during this test, but a few laps of the 1.8-mile Prestwold circuit in Leicestershire (the "home" venue of driving experience company Everyman Racing) gave me the chance to try out the León's other abilities, particularly since SEAT had set up an extra four chicanes for the purpose of rattling up and down the DSG gearbox.
The car had a new set of slick racing tyres fitted to it just before I got in - most of the rubber from the previous set had been left on the Prestwold tarmac by another journalist who had a full-scale "we should have been on the brakes 30 yards ago" lock-up on the way into one of the chicanes. (He did a quality job - the marks were very impressive.)
SEAT UK boss (and amateur racer) Peter Wyhinny then spent a couple of laps warming the new tyres before switching to the passenger seat and letting me take over. Trouble is, he didn't warm them as much as I thought he had. I realised this when the tail end of the León swished gracefully past the front in an embarrassing low-speed spin exiting a second-gear corner right in front of all the other SEAT people. After a quick check for flat spots (there weren't any) I went out again for a longer run, got some proper heat into the tyres, and found that this León is a truly fine race car.
It deals very easily with the available 300bhp. There's a bit of front-end squirming when you floor the throttle coming out of a slow corner, though no more than you would expect from a really well-sorted front-wheel drive racer. In all other respects it feels absolutely planted to the road - at least at the sort of speeds I was prepared to reach in six laps in someone else's £40,000 car with the head of the company sitting in the passenger seat.
The engine noise is deceptive - the car doesn't sound nearly as quick as it actually is, so what feels like quite an early braking point turns out to be closer to where you have to turn into the corner than you first realise. This also makes the brakes feel slightly under-spec, though they're certainly made of the right stuff, with six-piston calipers pushing race pads into 362mm diameter discs up front. They need more pedal pressure than I'm used to applying with my left foot (with no clutch, there's a pedal either side of the steering column, kart-style), and this is at odds with the very light touch required for the steering, the throttle and the DSG paddles.
The one thing I really needed was to have the seat mounted even further back in the cabin, but time was short and the process would have taken ten minutes (the seat is mounted solidly and has to be unbolted from the car if you intend to move it). This meant that my legs were bent far too sharply, and without adequate support my buttocks felt like they were on fire as they tried to withstand the lateral g forces through all those chicanes.
This also explained what I first thought was a failure in the DSG system. The final corner of the lap at Prestwold is a long right-hander involving a change from second to third halfway round; several times the gearbox immediately made another change up to fourth, killing most of the car's acceleration at that point. I couldn't understand what was going on until I realised that I was actually making this second change with my right knee, which started fouling against the paddle shift as the speeds increased.
Oh well. At least I knew that the car was working properly, and that I wasn't (consciously) doing anything silly. For a longer test session or a competition I'd have the seat shifted a couple of inches further back, and then I'd be fully able to enjoy a really magnificent car which is without doubt the best one-make racer I've ever driven.
