Cupra Formentor VZ5 - long-term review

These long-term reports are designed for one thing – to give you, the reader, a true sense of what a car is like to run, day in, day out, over the course of many months. A true, warts-and-all reflection of real-world vehicle ownership. And we’ll get there, I promise. But for now, there’s a more important question to answer for the VZ5. Will it drift?

As touched on previously, the VZ5 comes with the VW Group’s torque splitting rear differential – an electro-hydraulic system with two clutches and independent torque delivery for each rear wheel, meaning that instead of just bunging 50 per cent of available power to the back axle, the system’s clever brain can redistribute torque to the rear wheel that needs it the most, be that for outright cornering stability, turn-in, or minimising understeer caused by the big heavy lump over the front axle.

And it works. Jump on the throttle mid-corner waaay before you think you should, and it’ll notably trim the line, particularly on faster, sweeping bends where you can really lean on the diff. It delivers reassuring, all-wheel-drive confidence though, rather than rear-biased lairiness.

Drift mode lets the car send nigh on all the rear axle’s torque to one wheel, generating, with any luck, power oversteer. Select it via the drive modes, agree to the pop-up message that makes you promise you’re not in your local Asda car park, and not a ham-fisted numpty, and it’ll disengage the car’s ESC. Mostly.

See, whilst hosting a methodical tyre test at the Top Gear Test Track recently, a wet corner and some spare time presented itself, and, well, you’d do what I did, which is prod the screen for drift mode, flick a right, left, right into Chicago to bring the rear round, stamp on the throttle before the apex and... mid results.

Dissatisfied, I handed the Cupra over to TG’s head-of-helmsmithery Ollie Marriage for a more qualified bung, and whilst the initial angle was better, the exit of the corner was just as underwhelming. “Aha!” said Ollie, "the ESC’s not really off."

So, press on the ESC to turn it back on, then a long press to cycle through ‘ESC Sport: directional stability is restricted’, and then ‘ESC Off: Stability Control is deactivated’. This delivered a fair deal more angle but notably more right foot-assisted oversteer on the exit.

It’s still a relatively neutral slide though, one that takes a fair old fling to get going, so don’t be expecting drift heroics unless you’re really quite committed. If you are, there’s sufficient AWD raucousness to maintain that old-school rally car feel.

Goofing around on circuit plays havoc with the wallet, though. In mixed road use (admittedly a reasonable portion of London traffic), we’re netting out at 25-26mpg. A few laps of Dunsfold and that had dropped to 12mpg. Sensible motorway use can see 33/34mpg, but a recent 1,400-mile run to the Alps and back at French motorway speeds returned just 27mpg average.