Petrol Heads’ Corner Cupra Formentor David O’Neill* I celebrate the first car review since lockdown 2020. It’s been a funny (weird) old year, with words like lockdown and alerts levels having commonplace usage. Since the lockdown of 2020 I was unable to get my hands on any vehicles to drive and had to either make up stuff – the 24 hour virtual car race, or dredge up material and patch articles together. With this heading, you will probably be scratching your head wondering what is coming next. I confess, I had to look some of it up myself. I knew that Cupra was made by SEAT, however that was all I knew. Luckily, Wikipedia provided the rest of the answers. Cupra Racing was formally known as SEAT Sport. It’s the high-performance motorsport subsidiary of SEAT. SEAT is a Spanish automobile manufacturer founded in 1971 and now embraced under the VW/Audi umbrella. Originally, SEAT was formed as a special vehicle
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department to compete in rallies in 1971. Apparently, it did very well back in the late 1990’s. In 2018, SEAT created the Cupra brand as its independent high-performance branch and SEAT Sport was officially replaced by Cupra Racing. Cupra has now come out with a series of high-performance cars which are distributed throughout New Zealand. The car I had was the Cupra Formentor. Formentor makes you think of Harry Potter with something dark, mysterious and evil. It’s not. In fact, Formentor has nothing to do with the villains in Harry Potter, nor does it have anything to do with brewing beer at home. It is a peninsula in Majorca, a nod to Cupra’s Spanish roots. Believe it or not, the word “Formentor” doesn’t appear anywhere in or on the car. Why that is, I don’t know. The model that I drove was the Formentor VZ. It’s a cracker. It’s driven by a 2000 cc 4 cylinder, petrol engine with a turbo charger bolted on. Surprisingly, it develops 228 kilowatts and has 400 nm of torque. It’s all wheel drive with a 7-speed DSG box. It weighs in at 1644 kilo’s (driver on board – but not me……).
DECEMBER 2021
