Cupra Leon Estate VZ1 - long-term review

Although I take great delight in the fact that I managed to steal Charlie’s Cupra – he’s Top Gear's head of video and owner of thousands of clamps, suction cups, tripods and an unhealthy number of cameras – I do feel a little guilty, too. Partly that’s because he’s now driving a DS something or other that looks more Postman Pat than avant-garde French goddess.

But mostly it’s because the Cupra is undoubtedly the photographer and videographer’s perfect car: fast enough to hold station with most stars of our videos, big enough to swallow hundreds of kilos of gear, decent ride quality for tracking shots and brilliant on airport runs, too. Several camera guys have professed their love and I think one or two have put in an order on the back of our Garage hero’s sterling work.

As the Cupra seems to live at the Top Gear test track at the minute you might call it the new Reasonably Priced Car, although at £50,160, I guess that depends on your definition of reasonable. It certainly does a lot of things very, very well. The Leon’s latest job was chasing the new rear-wheel drive Bentley Supersports through a thick fog of tyre smoke.

‘How was it?’ I asked the video team of Charlie and Harry Rudd. They couldn’t answer as they were busy shooting a Bentley badge or wheel in the 18th different way (just in case), but I imagine Charlie would say something like, ‘oh, so good. You tend to take for granted the engine on the road and almost forget how good it is. But when you use all the revs, the top-end is really exciting. Way more so than a Golf GTI’s similar engine. Not to mention my soul-murdering DS whatever it’s called'. Agreed.

Harry would then perhaps go on to say. ‘We had to turn off the start/stop as it’s really clunky and annoying. Plus, I wish the shifters had a nicer action as they feel more like a micro-switch than a proper paddle.’ Bloody hell. So accurate these guys. But anyway, despite some small flaws the Cupra never stops grafting and is always impressive.