• Great driving position, comfy seats
• Awful infotainment menu design
• Feels suitably upmarket

How is the quality and the layout?

Cupra has premium aspirations – and it did a good job of moving the Leon’s cabin upmarket. The most common touchpoints feel satisfying to use, apart from the touch-sensitive headlight control panel by your right knee. It sometimes took a couple of attempts to get the setting we wanted and the panel rattles on its mounts.

The Cupra Leon is a very easy car to get comfortable in, though. There’s a lot of adjustment in the steering column and the seats, and there’s loads of room for your feet under the dash. The lack of any physical controls on the dashboard is a bit of a bugbear, though, as we’ll now explain.

Infotainment and technology

We complained a lot about the pre-facelift Leon’s touchscreen. It was a confusing, sluggish mess of sub-menus, in which all the car’s functions (sat-nav, driver assistance technology, climate controls – the lot) were buried. Mercifully, for this facelifted model, Cupra robbed the updated Golf of its new 12.9-inch touchscreen.

The new screen is much faster than the old one, but it’s still hamstrung by Cupra’s rather shortsighted design decisions. That orange on black colour scheme is uncomfortable to read in both bright sunlight and pitch darkness – and you still need to wade through a mess of sub-menus to arrive at the function you want.

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At least the bigger screen means it’s easier to hit the function you’re aiming at. The old car’s small screen was difficult to use on a bumpy road, as the car’s firm suspension meant you were constantly bouncing around in your seat, missing the icon you wanted to select. Overall, though, the Golf GTI’s screen is a much easier system to live with.

Comfort

• Comfortable sports seats
• Massive wheels are noisy
• Intentionally firm suspension

We think the Cupra Leon is much better than the SEAT Leon on which it’s based. Those sporty bucket seats are even more comfortable than the chairs in the SEAT-branded variant, primarily because they support your lower back and legs better.

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There’s a bit of road rumble from the rubber-band tyres on the 19-inch alloys fitted to the VZ2 and VZ3 models, but refinement is perfectly acceptable otherwise. Even at motorway speeds, the engine is hushed, and wind noise is well suppressed. If anything, we wish the Cupra was a rowdier than the SEAT. It’s a little too composed for a sporty hatchback.