The big test: Hyundai i20N vs Australia

Plan A fell to pieces before we even set off from Sydney. A rainstorm stretching from the top of Australia to the bottom was heading east, scheduled to arrive where we were planning to go at the precise moment we intended to get there. We’re foolhardy enough to press on regardless, but the local authorities aren’t – they close the roads and hand out fines of £550 per wheel if you’re selfish enough to use them anyway. So we scrap the plan of a mostly pleasant trundle out west to the desert and do our best to scarper there as quickly as possible. Which goes swimmingly, right up until it fails entirely.

Photography: Alastair Brook

It seems that from the moment we set off, everyone in Australia plumb forgot how to drive. A few hours in, we find a truck on its side, blocking the mountain pass and forcing us to backtrack down the entire mountain to pick another way through. This rather sets the tone from there on, with countless accidents and maddening delays. About 10 hours after we set off, we very nearly end the entire trip with a bang when a row of lights leaps into view from behind an escarpment. After kicking the brake pedal with enough force to take a door clean off its hinges, we inch our way towards the glow. It reveals a truck jackknifed across the road, its trailer over just far enough to prise an oncoming car open like a tin can.

So, for the first time in the trip but not the last, we give up entirely on making decent progress and start futzing around. Highlights include a slow lap around Mount Panorama, a trip to Carcoar Dam for a chat with the locals, and putting the i20N on disused railway tracks and making “it corners like it’s on rails” jokes. Best to put that last one down to exhaustion. Eventually, we remember what we’re supposed to be doing and press on, sheer bloody mindedness holding fatigue at bay over the course of 20 hours at the wheel. Finally, we reach the road to a place called Lake Mungo, in time to find the roads still open, but late enough to see clouds coalescing on the distant horizon. Spurred on, we leave the last vestige of tarmac and venture onto dirt, knowing that if we fail to make it back out before the storm hits, the roads will close and we’ll be trapped for days, if not longer. We can’t quite tell the weight of the clouds yet, but we can damn sure understand the pressure.

The roads to Mungo are an unpredictable medley of every kind of surface – solid stone, soft powdery dust, egg-sized rocks formed into deep channels by gigantic 4x4s, and hard earthen ruts filled with shifting desert sands. Driving them at any speed requires a good deal of concentration – driving them at the speed we are takes almost all of it, with a tiny fraction in reserve for wondering when a regular dumb idea becomes industrial strength.

But we need to keep the speed up. Partly because we want to get to Mungo and back before the storm hits, and partly because we’re relying on a concept that seemed, like all interesting ideas, to be very good at the time and much less so in retrospect. The theory with washboard surfaces is that you travel fast enough to skim across the crests and not shake your car to bits in the troughs. In practice, it means giving up a considerable fraction of whatever traction you might have, and travelling at the sort of pace that prompts a little voice in your head to ask exactly where it was you gleaned such wisdom in the first place.

When Hyundai started marketing the i20N as rally derived, it felt like a bit of a stretch. But with frankly absurd front end grip and a tail that’s happy to wag as much as you’d like, it’s without question the closest I’ve ever felt to the old Finnish rally masters. Even at triple digit speeds (measured in metric, of course) across ever changing surfaces, at no point does the i20N feel out of its depth. For a dirt driving novice and a tiny hot hatch to feel so untouchable at those speeds, on those roads, is nothing short of incredible. The i20N tells me what it needs to stay on the straight and narrow – a bit of countersteer here, lift off the throttle there, let the back come around for this bit – and my job becomes as simple as following instructions. It’s almost a shame when our ersatz rally special stage comes to an end, but ending it at a place like Lake Mungo is one hell of a way to deal with the loss.

It’s still called a lake, even though it’s been about 10,000 years since it held any water. Optimistic sorts out here. Most importantly, it’s where they found Mungo man, who was buried on the shoreline some 40,000 years ago and whose discovery overthrew every conception about when man first set foot on Australian soil. Surveying the seemingly limitless expanse of Mungo, it’s undoubtedly a place of incalculable history, otherworldly landscapes and precisely twice as many flies as is even remotely necessary.

It turns out the i20N’s just the thing for proper lift-off oversteer silliness in a muddy field

We watch the clouds continue to marshal along the horizon, blocking what would otherwise be one of the all time great sunsets, then realise we’re very many miles from civilisation and will now need to drive said miles in total new moon darkness. This presents something of a problem: headlights, by dint of their design, tend to point forwards. Kangaroos, by dint of their incomparable stupidity, tend to bound out of the darkness at oblique angles, leaving the safety of the scrub to place themselves directly into your path.

Eventually, sheer probability puts a five-foot-something red kangaroo directly where physics is unfailingly about to carry the i20N. The loose surface foils the ABS, the back end slings around and now we’re sliding towards about 75kg of kangaroo instead of just driving. The marsupial surveys the rapidly approaching high beams, weighs its options like you might deliberate over a lengthy lunch menu, then casually hops to one side as we slide through the space it had occupied a fraction of a second ago. Rabbits are smarter, but less fortunate. We clip one and square another up perfectly under the i20N’s left front wheel, perhaps proving once and for all that it’s better to be lucky than clever.

Precious layers of enamel are worn away from teeth, but we emerge through the gauntlet of wildlife, running on fumes, caked in dust and somehow without a kangaroo as a bonnet ornament. After a life-saving roadside jerrycan top-up, we have just enough to get to the nearest service station for fuel and half-cooked pot noodles in lieu of dinner. But the storm hasn’t hit, and my last thought before collapsing into bed is to wonder if we haven’t rushed this whole trip for nothing.

My answer comes in the morning. The world is made of water; sky, land and air are filled to bursting. The i20N is washed clean in the deluge, yesterday’s dirt road madness now just a memory. The good news is that the rain makes lots of fresh red mud. And you might make hay while the sun shines, but you play in the rain.

It turns out the i20N’s just the thing for proper lift-off oversteer silliness in a muddy field. No need for the manual handbrake; just roll up to the corner – in this case, a lone saltbush – come off the power and turn, letting the rear sling around. Even in the ham fists of the terminally exhausted, it’s easy to start linking slides and having proper fun. The i20N has an ultra rigid, two-piece torsion bar in the back, combined with a proper limited-slip diff up front. What this jumble of jargon means from a practical perspective is that the front hooks up and digs into even churned up mud, understeering only when you’re being an absolute pillock. Get it right, on the other hand, and you can somehow steer from the rear in a front-drive car. Rear-drive slides would be almost too easy to be satisfying out on a surface like this; getting the i20N’s weight transfer dialled in to link two, then three, then four mud roosting arcs is incomparably rewarding. Which is good news, given this turns out to be the only sliver of joy in an otherwise hateful day.

Mud-caked and rejoining the road hundreds of miles from anywhere, it looks like our trip is still mostly on track – right up until the track is shut. We study maps, hoping for another way. There isn’t one. We rifle through various plans, new destinations and increasingly last-ditch ways to get there. There aren’t any. Exhausted, utterly defeated and with the day already nearly over, we slink back to the same motel we checked out of this morning. Given that we’re basically marooned, we decide the only reasonable course of action is to leave the car at the motel, trudge to the pub and pour beer into ourselves until things seem less bleak. This turns out to be a questionable method for coping with stress, but also the first good decision we’ve made so far.

Spirits and clothes thoroughly dampened, we sit at the bar, drinking strong beer and complaining weakly. After supplying food, beer and a sympathetic ear, publicans Ben and Marie then casually salvage the entire trip. It’s just a matter of going west until you reach the fringes of civilisation and heading north from there. Do that and you’ll find a road called the Silver City Highway. After the string of defeats that have put us in this pub, it feels like a road paved with gold.

So, the next day, we push further west than we even knew was possible. It’s the right call – the storm continues east and our luck finally stops going south. There’s a palpable feeling of freedom as the oppressive, omnipresent cloud rolls back and the weather finally behaves like it should in the Australian outback: an endless supply of yellow sun, blue sky and red dirt.

We follow the highway and end up in the wilds behind the Silver City itself, Broken Hill. Out there, on the very last unbroken hill before the desert flattens out entirely, the horizon curves around us in an uninterrupted, 180˚ horizontal arc. We sit at the dusty intersection of humanity and wilderness, gazing into the twilight and reflecting on the mad journey that brought us here. Eventually, when it’s dark enough to see satellites streak in front of the countless stars and the dust of the desert blurs into the haze of the Milky Way, we finally figure it out.

If everything goes to plan, it’s not an adventure. Absolutely nothing went to plan on this trip, but every time we’d emerge unscathed, the car humming along as if we hadn’t run a rally special stage on washboard roads. Or aquaplaned for hundreds of miles, trying to wrest control of the front wheels from apparently unconquerable physics. Or played in the earth until the i20N was equal parts mud and machine, before trundling hundreds of miles with only a desert storm to wash away the evidence.

It took 2,500 miles, 56 muesli bars, two road-killed rabbits and a once-in-a-decade deluge to find out for sure, but we did: the i20N is brilliant for everything you’ll actually use it for, astoundingly good at a bunch of things you won’t and engineered to a standard that no one in their right mind will ever exceed. We’ve taken it to the edge of humanity and back again without a single modification, farkle or ruined part – not even a buckled rim or burst tyre.

As we rolled east out of Broken Hill to head home, a realisation dawned: the hill might be broken, we might be broken, but the car somehow isn’t. And it’s this simple refrain that stayed with us on the 14-hour drive back to Sydney, back through the same storm that had washed away our every plan until there was nothing left but an idea and the adventure it created: do what no one will ever think to do in a car like this, just to see if it can be done, and see what happens.

And what happened was every bit as surprising, spectacular and landscape changing as... well, rain in the desert. A low slung hot hatch that relished travelling hundreds of miles on roads that exist in name and shared delusion only. A tiny car remaining both comfortable and completely unflustered across oppressively large distances. A little Hyundai hatchback winning not just Top Gear’s Speed Week and the Performance Car of the Year award, but doing so well, so far out of its comfort zone, that it’s impossible to do anything but make it our overall Car of the Year.