Sure enough, the Formentor VZ5’s stacked exhausts make an appealing noise; although, funnily enough, arguably not quite enough of it if you’re expecting a really menacing, effusive combustive persona.
The car adopts the 2.5-litre, ‘EA855’ five-cylinder turbo petrol engine also seen in the Audi RS3 Sportback (and rumoured to be fitted soon into a special-edition VW Golf R). It’s not quite as powerful here as in the Audi, but just as torquey; and it drives through the same torque-vectoring, clutch-based four-wheel drive system as both the Audi and Golf use, with its rear-axle torque splitter promising top-level handling smarts – and also being wielded to deliver a particular Drift setting among many other driving modes.
It’s a superb-sounding, powerful, free-revving and characterful engine. 385bhp makes this car commandingly, breath-checkingly fast, of course, at both lower crankspeeds and high-. It has great initial torque and pedal response, but also a real appetite for revs – and a sense of unstoppable breadth of torque that marks it out as something much more special than the highly-strung four-pot your money might otherwise have bought.
The thing is, in some ways it’s not quite the transformative influence on the Formentor’s driving experience that you might expect. Cupra has been using ‘piped in’ electronic engine noise, of a decidedly five-cylinder-sounding kind, to make its four-pot models more appealing for some time now. A 2.0-litre Formentor, or even a 1.5-litre hybrid, actually sounds quite five-cylindered when you turn on its Performance or Cupra driving modes.
Well now, that particular chicken has come home to roost. Because now that Cupra has put a real five-cylinder motor into one of its cars, the upshot doesn’t sound so different, or as special as it might.
It could also be louder and more genuine; those quad pipes struggle a little bit to produce the bombastic audible presence you expect, especially at idle and from the kerbside.
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