Home ground advantage for Hyundai i30 N

HYUNDAI engineers will not have to venture far when they give their new high-performance baby, the i30 N, its first motorsport test this Easter Saturday.

The race will held more or less outside the front door of the Hyundai Motor Europe Technical Centre at the Nurburgring in Germany, where much of the car’s chassis was developed.

The South Korean company says it is using the VLN-series Group N production car endurance race to help hone the car’s performance ahead of its global launch, including Australia, later this year.

Engineers from Hyundai’s German and Korean research and development centres will double as the race drivers in the race that pits a wide variety of high-performance production cars against each other in a timed race lasting between four to six hours.

These engineers should not have much trouble finding their way around the 25km circuit and its 73 corners – they have clocked countless laps there in engineering mules.

Hyundai says the i30 N prototypes it will race are close to production specification, without the modifications made by others in the race to cope with the demands of endurance racing.

The company did not say if it was racing the proposed standard version of the i30 N, with its 184kW 2.0-litre turbo-charged engine, or the performance pack variant that reportedly makes about 202kW of power.

The cars will, however, have the six-speed manual gearbox that will be the sole offering at launch, at least until the planned eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission arrives around 2019.

Hyundai Motor head of vehicle test and high-performance development Albert Biermann said: “We want our high performance brand to have considerable racing pedigree so it is important that we compete with minimal modifications.

Nurburgring is where the i30 N has undergone much of its testing and chassis development.”

Saturday’s race is one of a series of nine such events to be held in the VLN series at the Nurburgring during 2017.