Brendan drives the Hyundai i30 N at Mount Panorama

Brendan Reeves has been working closely with Hyundai as they put the final touches to their highly anticipated i30 N performance car.

Reeves drove a prototype of the car at Mount Panorama, Bathurst recently under the watchful eye of Hyundai Vice President and head of the company’s N performance division, Albert Biermann.

“We do a lot of testing at the Nürburgring Nordschlieffe, but there are also other very challenging race tracks out there, and one of the most challenging is Bathurst here in Australia,” said Mr. Biermann.

“It’s a very good experience to drive here at Mount Panorama and include the data we gather into our tuning that we will continue in Europe. I think the right driver on this track would have a lot of fun with the i30 N.”

Reeves drove the heavily disguised i30 N prototype in the Nulon Hill Climb and Super Sprint events at Bathurst and was able to identify several small areas of improvement which Hyundai engineers will now address at their German and South Korean technical facilities.

Part of the testing work involved monitoring and developing the way the plug-in MoTeC dash unit talks to the i30 N, which will ultimately allow motorsport enthusiasts access to the same type of displays and information found in the Hyundai i20 WRC rally car. Such features would include lap timing, performance information, data logging, custom graphical page layouts, and video overlay data solutions.

Several other i30 N prototype vehicles have been undergoing secret testing in rural Australia since January 2017, including hot weather endurance testing as well as rigorous quality and performance evaluation, and Reeves has also been involved with these tests.

The i30 N, which is set to launch in Australia later this year, is Hyundai’s first entry into the performance car market.

“The i30 N is designed to be a hot hatch that will be very much at home on the race track, so validation testing at Mount Panorama was a key part of its global engineering development programme,” says Hyundai Motor Company Australia Chief Operating Officer, Scott Grant.

“But that’s just half the story,” he said. “It has to work well on our uniquely challenging roads, too, so local testing and evaluation is critical, especially as Australia will be one of the largest markets for this car globally. The results have been very impressive and personally I can’t wait to see how Australian enthusiast drivers respond to this great little hot hatch.”

Watch Brendan Reeves tackle Mount Panorama in the high-performance i30 N prototype in the video below.