The i30 Sedan N vs The Old Pacific Highway

Our Performance Blue Hyundai i30 Sedan N is parked up alongside the coffee queue at Cowan's Pie in the Sky bakery. A flood-gorged, varnish-brown Hawkesbury winks below us in rare La Niña sunlight. The air is sauna humid. The line, mostly men, smells like motorbike leathers, sausage rolls, and lies. The Hundy smells like brakes.

"They reckon those Ns are good." Cowan's iconic pie shop is a weekend magnet for various lateral g-force aficionados. So our i30 Sedan N is a magnet for pastry-flecked chat.

"They look good."

"They look really good."

"I heard you coming up the hill!"

"You going surfing, are ya?"

"Hang on, where's me sauce?"

We were ready.

Come out to play

Is there a better time to gorge on the joy of driving than the sabbath? If you can find a road relatively free of caravans, pelotons and policemen, the weekend is ripe for reclamation as a driving nirvana. Especially in the i30 Sedan N, Hyundai's first ever hot sedan.

Born in Namyang and honed at the Nürburgring, our i30 Sedan N has been calibrated to max out the fun-o-meter every time you get in. A box it ticks, not least because it allows you to do so without actually needing to exceed the speed limit. But people will definitely still hear you coming up the hill.

The i30 Sedan N's natural effervescence has inspired today's ambitious itinerary. On what might otherwise be a sleepy afternoon, a rare combination of clean easterly swell and light, all-day westerly winds mean the surf is calling… albeit clogged by Sunday crowds. But doing anything today except enjoy our N's precisely tuned 2.0-litre turbo flat power engine seems criminal.

A Slavic proverb comes to mind as we discuss the i30 Sedan N's kerb appeal with a man who's extracted himself from a Ural sidecar: "The wolves are sated and the sheep are intact." An English translation might be to have one's cake and eat it too. Our DCT model's 392Nm of torque and 206kW of power (before overboost) are enough to get your right ankle twitching in your sleep, even if Kelly Slater's on loop in your head. And so we've planned a one-day, out-of-Sydney surf jaunt… with bends.

We're chasing the job lot as we head north from Cowan to bob over sweeping crests and swoop low through high-speed S-bend dips on one of the very best bits of driving road in NSW, the Old Pacific Highway.

Avoiding the adjacent freeway, we swing through Mount White then track dead north, detouring left at Kulnura to stop by at the Mangrove Creek Dam Picnic Area. Walkers Ridge Road takes us east again, ahead of a relaxed descent to the pulse of the Pacific at Catherine Hill Bay. Perfect.

The old and the beautiful

The stretch of the Old Pacific Highway north of the Peats Ferry Bridge is almost worth the trip on its own. In terms of grins-per-kilometre, it knocks the adjacent Pacific Motorway into a cocked hat, which sounds like the worst sort of hat you could wear.

In the sections where it's crowded in by sheer sandstone rock walls, the echo of the i30 Sedan N's Variable Exhaust Valve System yodels like a Swiss black metal band. Backing off and braking into a turn produces a thrilling snarl that fizzes all the way down to your coccyx.

Meanwhile, the N division's trademark N Corner Carving Differential is simultaneously deft and decisive. A Grand Tourer this is not – it's a scalpel, not a carving knife. Which is good. This is a Sunday Funday, not a cruise, and that coccyx feels all but slotted into to the blacktop, like a Scalextric wire.

Its electronic limited slip differential's torque transfer during lateral G turns delivers traction with cheerful confidence, encouraging an extra spoonful of have-a-go enthusiasm with each turn. It never feels unsettled, gripping like tetanus on 19 inches of bespoke Michelin rubber.

The impression is more cheerleader than coach: a car that pumps your tyres and tells you to have fun out there, rather than delivering a stirring, Pacino-style Any Given Sunday rev-up. This is a friendly, not a final. See what you can do. By all means, dominate a track day if that's your bag, but you needn't stretch the limits of the i30 Sedan N's engineering – or of your own talent – to immerse yourself.

Properly alive through bends, and with a torque band unblighted by holes, it's a buzzy, pure-fun riposte to larger, often Teutonic, and always Very Serious RWD performance sedans. Which isn't to say it's slow. Quite the contrary. A 0-100km/h sprint of 5.3 seconds provides bedrock performance from which it can (and does) hang other flourishes.

There are also the Hollywood touches. They shouldn't matter. But they do. Perhaps it's a Pavlovian response, a reaction to what happens next, but the i30 Sedan N's collection of Michael Bay flourishes actually does add to the drama. Cases in point: the N Grin Control System's visuals, and that big red overboost button.

Toggling through drive modes in the i30 Sedan N produces distinctly different animations on the fully digital, customisable binnacle screen. With a flash of red as you shift from ‘Normal' to ‘Sport', and a burst of CGI flame as you thumb the handy N Grin Control system button into N mode, any gimmickiness is soon overwhelmed by excitement.

Each of the five settings (also including ‘Eco' and an ‘N Custom' setting, perfect for incremental track-day adjustments) feels distinct and worthwhile, palpably different. And with our DCT version's N Grin Shift button shunting our 206kW to 214kW for a Roger Ramjet-like 20-seconds – with a cool countdown timer to boot, just like you'll find in a Porsche 911 – it's pure videogaming fun. With a palpable 392Nm on tap to boot – all the way from 2,100 to 4,700rpm, the shove is real.

The Mangrove Creek Dam Picnic Area is worth the detour, although the road in never quite reaches the heights of the Pacific Highway before it. More worthy is the jaunt east along Walkers Ridge, with a short detour up Basin Forest Road to the Bar Lookout. And then comes Martinsville, where we bark new instructions to Siri via CarPlay and sniff the Tasman Sea.

Huge storm swells have devoured much of Catherine Hill Bay's beachfront, but we're rewarded with a clean peak on dusk. It's taken us three hours to get here, but we're still just 90 minutes from home if you sacrifice the character of all those closed-in corners for the brutal mundanity of the motorway.

Time to bomb it south to the city, cosseted by the i30 Sedan N's array of SmartSense safety features, such as Lane Keeping Assist, which we've had toggled off for most of the day, but now appreciate more as the stars emerge.

We may be wet, hungry, and still a long way from home, but Sunday Funday has paid off. The smell of brakes has faded. The N Grin Control system's ratcheted back from N to Eco. The pie's been digested and the wetsuit's dripping saltwater into the footwell.

Every aspect of the id has been stilled. The wolves are sated and the sheep are intact.

The Special Australian Calibrated N TECH behind Sunday Fundays

It should come as no surprise that Hyundai's sporty, grin-inducing N-badged cars shine at their very brightest on roads like the Old Pacific Highway and Putty Road, because it was exactly for these roads that their suspension was tuned.

While the suspension hydraulics for the N cars are set globally, the suspension mapping - basically the electronics and software that make up its dynamic damping programs - were specifically tuned for our conditions, according to Tim Rodgers, Hyundai Australia's Product Development Manager.

"Those settings are bespoke to Australia and that's because the roads in Europe are very different to here, they're very smooth, while our roads are a lot harder and that can involve more body movement and more mid-corner compression, and we also have very spirited drivers, so we work hard to get that right," Rodgers explains.

"When I tune the damping, I start with ‘would my Mum drive this?' And that's what we come up with for Comfort mode, and then in N mode, it's about what would I want for a road like the Old Pacific Highway or Putty Road?

"Roads like the Old Pacific and Putty… people don't toddle around on those, our drivers, and so it's about dialling the car in for those roads and those kinds of drivers, which is less common in Europe. The European settings are massively fun on a super smooth road, but we're about making sure the N cars are good on those harder, flowing Australian back roads.

"I know on one section of the Old Pacific, heading north, there are five corners in a row that really tighten on you, for example, and you don't get that in Germany, the bends are bit more consistent.

"So with all the N cars, they've done a lot of testing on those roads, definitely the Old Pacific, the Putty Road, all the way up to Cessnock, but also down south, the Royal National Park near Sydney, all the way down to Omeo in Victoria. We go everywhere."

The unique quality of our roads was also something the man behind the success of the N brand, former BMW M head honcho Albert Biermann, who became the lead engineer behind the Hyundai N performance car range, appreciated.

"Biermann is just amazing, he knows everything, his attention to detail is incredible and he personally signed off on everything in the N range, and back in 2017 he came out here and drove all our roads in what was then the prototype of the i30 N," Rodgers recalled.

"He was just amazing, I can't think of anyone else in the industry who could do what he did with the N range."

Biermann's goal, which he instilled in Rodgers and everyone else at Hyundai, was to make N about fun, "about BPM (Beats Per Minute) not just RPM".

As Rodgers puts it, making a car faster is all well and good, but at every stage the engineers were encouraged to make sure that any advances would make the car more enjoyable as well.

"Fun is what actually matters, driving fun - impressive lap times are good, but with N it's all in the search of how many grins we can generate," Rodgers enthused.

"That was the overriding product concept, every decision we take asks that question of, 'will this be more fun, will it be a cooler, more fun car to be in?'

"We wanted to make the Hyundai brand about being fun, and that's what N does for us. It's a real passion project.

"And it takes a lot of time, it's a fine balance to strike, it takes a lot of time and effort testing the cars on a lot of different roads, in a lot of different scenarios with a lot of different drivers to balance that out - maximising fun rather than outright pace.

"And we invested that time, sticking to that core mantra of being about BPM rather than RPM."

As we have seen, it was time well invested.