It’s a question we’ve probably all wondered at one time or another: how much of our speed in a blast from A to B comes from our car, and how much from our driving talent, or lack thereof.
Car Throttle dispatched petrolhead presenter Alex and non-car-guy co-worker Ethan to Llandow Circuit in South Wales with a pair of N-badged Hyundai i20s to find out.
One of those i20s is the i20 N, a 201 hp rival for the Ford Fiesta ST that comes with a limited slip diff, manual transmission with rev-matching functionality, and a solid 203 lb ft of torque.
The other i20 is its hot hatch wannabe brother, the wallet-friendly i20 N Line, which gets some of the true N’s performance styling, but mates it with a 118 hp turbocharged 1.0-liter triple (an 83 hp atmo 1.2 is also available for people whose insurance companies really hate them).
Related: Is The 2021 Hyundai i20 N Better Than A Ford Fiesta ST?
Car Throttle’s Alex drives the proper i20 N and manages a best lap time of 49.00 seconds, and judging from the camera shots of the car hopping curbs, and how close to barfing Ethan looks, we can assume he knows what he’s doing.
Then the pair swap places and Ethan puts in his i20 N hot laps. Well, warm laps. He’s clearly much slower everywhere and fluffs a few gearchanges. At this point you’d put money on Alex nosing ahead in the three-cylinder N Line, and when the duo jump into it for its timed session even Ethan seems fairly sure he’s been beaten.
Ethan rightly points out that the one place even Alex can’t make the N Line go quickly is down the back straight, where the hot hatch is almost 20 mph faster, but it still looks like Alex has got it in the bag.
But when the numbers come in it’s not that way at all. As expected, Ethan records a much slower time in the N that Alex did in the same car, his 52.74-second best putting him almost 3 seconds behind. But Alex’s 54.03-second time in the N Line means he was over a second slower again.