by David Finlay (06 Jun 07)

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).

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