Performance & drive
What it’s like to drive, and how quiet it is
The driving experience in the Cupra Leon varies quite a lot depending on the version, but we'll start with the entry-level 1.5 150 TSI. If you treat it as a sporty family car, performance is fine, but a mere 148bhp isn’t exactly scintillating in the world of hot hatches.
For less money, both the Hyundai i20 N and Ford Fiesta ST are far more fun, and you can get a near identical Seat Leon with the same engine for much less.
The 1.4 TSI e-Hybrid 300 plug-in hybrid (PHEV) is an entirely different proposition. For a start, it can officially take you 36 miles using battery power alone, and that’s something its rivals can’t emulate.
Having an electric motor to add low-end thrust to the petrol engine is also good news for flexibility, although it’s nowhere near as punchy as the 300 and 310. The 0-62mph time is 6.7sec – only about a second faster than a Seat Leon 1.5 TSI 150 and miles off the pace of the key hot hatches at this price. The battery also adds weight, and that rather dampens any thrills in the bends.
The issue of weight taints the driving experience offered by the 310 estate a bit, too. It weighs 160kg more than the 300 hatch, so never feels as eager to make quick changes of direction. The margins here are smaller, though, and the extra traction the estate has courtesy of four-wheel drive does help it feel more composed and planted on greasy roads.
Every Cupra Leon has plenty of grip, and you can make rapid progress in all of them, but it’s the 310 estate that gets our vote as the best to drive relative to its peers, including the Ford Focus ST Estate and Mini Clubman JCW. It also has the best steering, because there's less 'torque steer' (when the steering wheel pulls left then right in your hands as you accelerate hard).
All the Leon Cupras we’ve driven have had adaptive suspension, which has three main settings (Comfort, Sport and Cupra) plus a number of settings beyond and between those three, so you can really finetune things. The trouble is that, while you can make the Cupra very compliant over softer folds in the road, anything sharp creates more of a thwack than it would in a VW Golf GTI with a similar adaptive suspension set-up.
