Opinion: The Hyundai i20 N taps into hot hatch nostalgia

We buy high-performance cars for all sorts of reasons. If there’s only one space on the driveway, something like a Subaru WRX wagon might provide the perfect commuter machine for the week but a mountain-road muncher on the weekend. If you want to know what it’s like having your eardrums licked by angels then 10 cylinders will do the trick, and if you want to feel like a recently departed howitzer shell, something with a McLaren badge is key. But I recently drove the Hyundai i20 N and I now realise there’s another reason to yearn for a high-performance car.

Up front, the smallest member of Hyundai’s Namyang Proving Ground-inspired performance family has a 1.6-litre turbo four-cylinder that produces 150kW and it needs 6.7 seconds to get to 100km/h, so it’s not especially fast. Practical? It will accommodate five people if you insist but those people won’t like you when the journey is over and the 310-litre boot is not exactly cavernous.

Yet hit the go button in this little hatch and something unusually joyous happens. With a kerb weight less than 1200kg, a six-speed manual gearbox, proper mechanical LSD managing the front wheels and a little WRC blood the i20 N is a motoring masterpiece. There’s an immediate sense of confidence to chuck yourself at corners and, at the limit, instead of spitting you into a tree it’ll cock a rear wheel like it’s having an excitement pee.

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The steering is beautiful, the brakes are strong, its ride isn’t horrendous, the engine is vocal, it has a proper handbrake and a lovely chassis. I am in love with the i20 N. From the first steer of this car, there was a strange sense of familiarity. Something about its turbo power delivery, the jaunty upright driving position, its ability to make slow feel fast and its raw, slightly compromised, approach to speed. And then it clicked. The i20 N is the first car in years that reminds me of the mental turbo hatches I grew up with.

In the late 1980s, a glorious hot hatch era dawned when manufacturers realised tiny shopping carts could liberate performance gains with forced induction. We’re not talking extensively developed, homologated specials like the mid-engined Renault 5 Turbo but quick and nasty bolt-on performance that was often deeply flawed and hilariously entertaining.

The MG Metro Turbo had a 1.3-litre four-cylinder and 69kW but even that was too much for its almost unchanged transmission with so much torque-steer it felt like it had factory fitted bent steering arms. The MG purportedly rolled on a Lotus-tuned chassis, but let’s just say it was no Esprit. Renault’s 5 GT Turbo had a 1.4-litre 85kW engine but employed a cheap blow-through carburettor turbo system which had a tendency to condense fuel in the inlet manifold, lean-out under load and promptly self-destruct – if you could get it started at all.

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Then there was my own beloved Mk1 Fiat Uno Turbo ie. The Italian maker claimed Ferrari developed its 1.3-litre engine but in reality the prancing horse’s contribution was to suggest an oil jet under each piston. Nonetheless, its fuel-injected and intercooled four-pot produced 77kW and in a car that weighed just 845kg it was a sensation. Unlike its rivals, the Italian’s engine was a cracker. However, it wasn’t without flaw and its recycled bean-tin body would shed a red haze of oxidized metal every time full boost was applied. Its ABS could also only function once per drive and needed resetting by cycling the ignition.

None of this mattered and I can still recall the excitement of hopping into a car and seeing a boost gauge mounted in the middle of all the dials. I would give almost anything to have one more laggy, whistling full-noise blast in my Fiat. Turbo hatches in the late ’80s and ’90s were not fast, unreliable, inefficient and downright unsafe – so it’s about now Hyundai will be fashioning a voodoo doll of me for comparing its i20 N to some of history’s most shoddily built hot hatches.

What makes the Hyundai so special is that it captures the mechanical purity of early turbo hatches and packages it into something that’s essentially uncompromised. Of all the reasons I thought I might want to one day own a reasonably priced South Korean compact hatchback I never thought it would be the best motive of all – pure unadulterated nostalgia.

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