Seat Leon St Cupra 300
When it comes to cars, Spain is on par with Ethiopia and South Sudan. But this one — though ugly — isn’t half bad.
What springs to mind when you think of Spain? Well, for me, it’s the excellent medical care when you have pneumonia, but for everyone else I suspect it’s a blend of things. You have those who’ll think of the cathedrals and Guernica and cooking freshly caught shellfish on wild Atlantic beaches. It’s mountains and deserts and wearing tight trousers while you stab a bull. It’s clubs that stay open until dawn. It’s beautiful, flavoursome olive oil and old men sitting in plastic chairs at the side of the road until they’re 120 years old. And there’s paella, which is made by cooking up a bag of rice and emptying the contents of your bin into it. God knows how this works but it does. I love it.
Spain’s great. It’s my second favourite Mediterranean peninsula. Which is odd because when it comes to cars, it’s on a par with Ethiopia and South Sudan. Yes, it has given the world Fernando Alonso but he now spends his time driving round at the back, making jokes over the radio. Or turning up at the wrong racetrack and doing the wrong sport.
So what about Spain’s car industry? Back in 1898 an outfit that became Hispano-Suiza began. But that went bankrupt in 1903 and later became French. And after that? Well, put it this way, the history of the Spanish automotive industry takes up four lines on Wikipedia. At this point, Spanish car enthusiasts – both of them – will be jumping up and down, reminding me out loud there is Seat, and they’re right. Seat is Spanish. Apart from the fact that it’s owned by Volkswagen, which is German, and its cars are made in the Czech Republic, Belgium, Argentina, Portugal, Ukraine, Slovakia and, naturally, Germany.
However, the car I refer to today was made in Spain. Using many of the same parts that Volkswagen uses to make the Golf R. It’s called the Seat Leon Something-or-other 300 4Drive estate and when I came out of my office and saw it sitting there in a car park, my shoulders sagged as if I’d suddenly got a puncture. The Golf R estate isn’t much to behold but this somehow was even worse. They should have called it the Fat Girl’s Ugly Sister. It would have been an easier name to remember. And more honest.
‘It made an absolutely wonderful noise, the sound of an actual engine enjoying itself.’
Inside, it’s a Golf, except it had been fitted with some enormous front seats that were extremely comfortable. That made me happy as I set the fiddly Golf sat nav, fired up the 2.0-litre Golf engine, engaged first on the Golf DSG gearbox and set off to the countryside. It felt pretty much like a Golf on the motorway, apart from the excellent seats, but when I reached the Cotswolds it did something strange. Right at the top of the rev range, which is somewhere no Seat driver has been before, it made an absolutely wonderful noise. Not from the back, which is the usual thing these days, but from the front. It wasn’t electronic acoustic trickery in the exhaust pipe. It was the sound of an actual engine enjoying itself. I liked this noise so much that I spent my entire time with this car deliberately in the wrong gear.
Other things? Well, it is more comfortable than you’d imagine, given it has sporting pretensions, the four-wheel-drive system will be useful if you have a horse enthusiast in the family and it seemed to be fitted with all of the things you’d expect in a car of this price. And that raises an interesting point. You’ll note that the Seat is $2000 less expensive than the VW sister car. This price differential makes sense. Millions of people all around the world would want a hot, fast four-wheel-drive Volkswagen estate. And the number of people who want a hot, fast four-wheel-drive Seat is about none. So there has to be a price incentive. The Seat salesman has to be able to say: “You can buy this car and a sofa for the price of a Golf R.”
However, VW has some seriously big deals on the Golf R at the moment, at least in these parts. Two people in our television production office drive them for that reason. They even park them sometimes in the space reserved for my less expensive Golf GTI and I never mention the fact that they are staff and they have better cars than me and that they should learn their stations in life. Well, not often, anyway. However, in future I will be mentioning, quite a lot, the Seat Whatever It’s Called has better seats than their cars. And makes a nicer noise. And that they’ve been fools for not buying Spanish.
Seat Leon St Cupra 300
Engine: 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol (221kW/380Nm) / Average fuel: 7.2 litres per 100km / Transmission: Six-speed dual-clutch automatic, all-wheel drive / Price: £34,485 (N/A Australia) / Rating: 4 stars out of 5