Fife-cylinder frenzy: Epic Scottish road trip in Cupra's five-pot Formentor

Everyone loves a road trip, and I think I might just love them more than most. So when an email flew into my inbox from our sister magazine Classic & Sports Car telling me to pack my bags and head for Scotland, I was ecstatic. My quest to snap some wonderful classics would see me take in pretty much everywhere from Glasgow to Inverness and most places in between. My weapon of choice? The Cupra Formentor VZ5, obviously. The 330-mile motorway slog north revealed the Cupra's surprising talent for motorway cruising, with the superbly comfortable bucket seats and the fabulous low-end torque keeping me feeling far fresher than usual on the six-hour trek. I was determined not to simply sit on the motorway all the way to St Andrews, so I followed a squiggly looking alternative route suggested by the sat-nav. Coming off the M74 at Moffat, I was treated to 40 miles of impossibly quiet driving paradise that twisted and ducked its way through bleak hilltop moors and thick forests of spruce. As you can doubtless imagine, this is where the VZ5 really came into its own. Maybe I'm just going soft at the ripe old age of 23, but I feel that the full-whack turbo-nutter Cupra mode, with its extremely firm dampers, lead-weight steering and ultra-aggressive gearbox map, is just a little bit too much for any road, let alone the bumpy ones of Scotland, so I had a play around with the individual drive modes. After some experimentation I found a combination that provided a nice balance, with the dampers just below half stiffness to combat the bumps more effectively (albeit at the cost of body control), the steering and drivetrain set to their more engaging performance modes (one rung below Cupra level) and both the torque splitter and the exhaust flaps set to full McDonald's-car spec for a slightly more rear-driven feel and peak five-cylinder warble respectively. This turned out to be something of a magical combination that transformed the VZ5 into a machine that made progress with ruthless efficiency. Really, this car is defined by its torque – with 354lb ft, it's got more than a Ferrari F50 – so it's rare that you wring the engine out all the way to the 7000rpm redline; instead, it feels far more natural to simply roll on the throttle until you reach peak power at 5700rpm. The torque splitter seems simply to delete understeer, and you can really feel the effect it has on throttle as it modulates power to the individual rear wheels to hook the car round tighter turns. I had a whale of a time on the road to Edinburgh, before sticking everything back into Comfort for the more relaxed final leg to St Andrews and beyond. Cruising credentials were solidified over the next couple of days, as Dundee, Perth and Kinross came and went before I headed to Glasgow. A rush-hour trip along the hatefully congested M8 did test my patience somewhat, with the strangely inconsistent brake pedal and jerky low-speed behaviour of the DSG dual-clutch automatic box contributing heavily to my state of annoyance as I crawled around Scotland's second city. With this still fresh in my mind, the next morning I met up with a friend and his 'E91' Alpina D3, and we set our sights on one of the more famous roads in Scotland – the Duke's Pass. Ultra-twisty and with enough crests to make a motocross rider's jaw drop, it really did show the VZ5's frankly stonking ability to disassemble tricky bits of roads. The sheer pulling power out of the low-speed turns was simply unreal, and great fun was had. My friend turned back at the edge of the Highlands as I settled in for the long drive up to Inverness through some of the most stunning scenery this awesome country has to offer. Certainly a very pretty drive but not a driver's one, owing to the surprisingly straight roads that become choked in the summer by caravans and shockingly driven hire cars. That is, until I reached the end of Loch Ness and decided to take the less-travelled roads to the south of the water, where I found mile after mile of well-sighted, well-paved and brilliantly technical roads. Honestly, this was one of the greatest drives of my life, blasting through the mountains and feeling like Walter Röhrl as the five-cylinder screamed away up front. Then it was over to the fantastic Moray Motor Museum in Elgin before heading back down to Dundee, shooting over mountains along some of Scotland's most oft-praised roads as I ignored the A9 and cut an almost straight line down through the Cairngorms. I was thankful for the Formentor's tall ride height at times – the twisting roads are punctuated with sharp dips that I suspect have claimed many a front splitter. Anyway, it was just as great a drive as I had hoped it would be. Finally I turned back towards England, making sure to take in some of my favourite roads in the Borders along the way before the mind-numbing trek back to South Wales. I had covered around 1750 miles by the time I pulled onto my drive. Never let it be said that I don't spend enough time driving our long-termers...

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Fife-cylinder frenzy: Epic Scottish road trip in Cupra's five-pot Formentor

1800-mile trip to some of Scotland's best roads provides the perfect opportunity to test my VZ5's mettle

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Fife-cylinder frenzy: Epic Scottish road trip in Cupra's five-pot Formentor

1800-mile trip to some of Scotland's best roads provides the perfect opportunity to test my VZ5's mettle

More from Autocar

Top 10s

Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

Quick search

We recommend

Legal bits

About Autocar