Cupra Leon review – engine, gearbox and technical highlights
Turbo four pulls hard, if not to the redline. Augmented sounds are strange.
The engine and gearbox range found in most of the Leon range are familiar VW Group items, with 1.5-litre TSI units at the cooking end, 1.5 PHEVs in the middle and the 296bhp GTI Clubsport-spec variants of the EA888 2.0-litre, four-cylinder turbo at the top. All are paired exclusively with the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission and drive the front wheels only in the hatch.
To help keep wheelspin in check, the Leon 300 borrows the GTI's differential lock, but otherwise shares a fairly basic MacPherson strut front- and multi-link rear suspension system with adaptive dampers only fitted as standard on the top-spec VZ3.
The 333 Estate bumps power up to 328bhp and adds a set of driveshafts to the rear axle, making it all-wheel-drive. It’s only a Haldex system, sending a maximum of 50 per cent of available power to the rear wheels. That said, it does now get an S3-style torque-vectoring diff that allows a new Drift Mode.
The 296bhp 295lb ft EA888 2-litre turbocharged engine and seven-speed DSG gearbox are as we left them in the old car – strong, effective, if not totally involving. The ‘sound actor’ system is far from convincing, too. The synthesised sounds are meant to augment the famously flat-sounding EA888 but to me, they just sound a bit weird. At idle, it pulses in a way the faithful old four-banger never has, like an old Impreza with a drainpipe exhaust. ‘An aggressive but 100 per cent natural sound’ (as described by Cupra), it is not.
Cupra’s engineers have had free rein to do whatever they like with regards to the fine tuning of components available to them, even if the headline figures have had to remain constant in order to toe the corporate line. Same thing applies to the gearbox, which has more snap to its responses, especially when the drive programme is set to Cupra mode. This is purely down to the fine-tuning of the software.
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Although the oily bits would appear to be near enough identical to those of a GTI Clubsport – namely struts at the front, multi-link at the back with a multi-adjustable electronic damping system to take care of the detail – in reality it feels quite different from behind the wheel.
Braking is by cast iron ventilated discs front and rear, with larger 375mm, six-piston (front) Akebono brakes coming with VZ3-spec cars, in place of the Brembos Cupra used to offer. The electronic power steering system is fundamentally the same as in the GTI, too, but in practice it feels both lighter and, once again, sharper due to the more aggressive way in which the front suspension has been set up. And the rear has clearly been tuned to offer as much turn-in assistance as possible without ever going into full-on 205 GTi lift-off oversteer mode.
The electronic damping system is 15-way adjustable in individual mode, which is optional on the Golf. This level of fine-tuning is a great addition to tweak the set-up on the fly, but the interface is far too fiddly to use on the move. It’s better than before but physical buttons or a rotary switch to access this adjustability without looking would still be better.
