Petrol Head's 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 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……).

• 0-100 km/h 4.9 seconds

• Maximum Speed 250 km/h

• Fuel economy 7.7 litres/100km In reality – it goes like stink and has a ton of torque and pretty good economy.

The VZ is the flash one of the Formentor model range. It comes in at $68,900 plus on road costs and has pretty much everything (including a five-star NCAP rating) except for the black or blue leather (optional extra) and a variety of wheels, sunroof etc.

The photographs show the car in its matte paint, which is a $3,500 extra, with the copper accented wheels (they look pretty cool), also an extra. I knew it was attractive to all ages. My 17-year-old said it looked sick (which I understand to be pretty cool), my oldest son said it looked pretty cool and my wife thought it was attractive.

My car had the panorama sunroof, which has a sliding see through shade with darkened glass. You can open the shade, open both or one of the sunroofs and there a number of in between options.

I thought the car looked exceptional. The matte paint is very striking, and the copper accents look terrific.

What’s it like to drive?

For a little car with a two litre, four-cylinder motor it goes like it’s been nicked. It was exceptionally quick. The 0-100 (4.9 sec) time is probably the hint that it is quick and its handling is superb.

We did the usual- took it to the beach, which involves going over the Kopu-Hikuai hill and it drove through the corners incredibly well. It felt solid and cornered at pretty good speeds without any hint of being unsettled. It’s a crossover, which means that you get the benefits of an SUV and a car, but it isn’t quite as high off the ground as an SUV.

The good people at Cupra SEAT have amplified the sound through the speakers of the car. It snarl’s pops and sounds rorty. Excellent stuff!

They have a Cupra button on the steering wheel (alongside the start/stop button), which allows you to dial through the various driving modes the car can adopt. There is comfort, normal, sport and Cupra. There are also individual settings to choose from. The individual settings allow you to tailor the drive train mode, steering weight and you can fiddle with ride comfort with a sliding scale.

I quite like the noise but if you got sick of it, you could dial that out as well.

It is certainly a head turner. People were walking up and looking inside while I had it. The seats are very accommodating and comfortable.

The fuel efficiency was excellent. On the way over, I cycled in and out of the sport mode from comfort mode and back again. The fuel economy was 7.9 litres/100 km. On the way back, I purposely kept it in Cupra mode (their highest sport mode) and the return on economy was 8.7 litres/100 km. Remember, the drive there and back included the Kopu/Hikuai Road over the Coromandel ranges.

Inside

My car had the panorama sunroof, which has a sliding see through shade with darkened glass. You can open the shade, open both or one of the sunroofs and there a number of in between options.

The gearstick is a small toggle button which sits where the gearstick used to be. It does have an ESP-off button right above it and a couple of times I prodded that thinking it was the on/off button for ignition.

The bucket seats are very good. It has a huge touch screen for all the features available in the car. In the short time that I had it, I wasn’t able to master everything, but it certainly looked fairly useful. It has Apple Play as well.

There is a ton of room in the back seats for adults. Even the boot wasn’t too bad.

As you can see from the photograph, the rear looks quite different and, so does the front.

The badge looks like something out of the Transformer movie. There is not an awful lot to identify the car and you wouldn’t say the badge is a household identity. Overall, a mysterious car…..

At $68,900 plus, say, another $5,000 - $6,000 for the extras that were on my car, it’s a very competitive package. It’s quick, it’s economical and comfortable and has plenty of room inside, both for passengers and for luggage.

I reckon, given the bracket that it fits into, being the small Crossover/SUV bracket, it will be very competitive at that price. For example, the Audi SQ2, which retails at $81,000+, has similar sprint times and, I suspect, a similar motor.

Once these Cupras are out and about and are known a bit more widely, I think the brand will take off. They’ve got a large dealer network right throughout New Zealand and you have the range of costs for the V4 drive (slightly less power), all-wheel drive, 7 speed DSG at $54,900 + ORC. You don’t get all the fruit that you get with the VZ but you will still have a fair bit to play with.

However, if I was going to choose, I would get the VZ. It’s raucous, noisy and fun plus it has enough space to take the family, take the dog, take the cat, or none of the above.

If you’re in the market for a small, sporty, crossover hatch then this might be the car for you. Certainly, put it on your list to look at. You won’t be disappointed.

* David O’Neill is a Hamilton barrister practising out of Riverbank Chambers. He says he does not spend a lot of money on cars. Uh huh.