Fancy buying a Hyundai touring car?

There’s a new Hyundai touring car coming, and this is it. Well, a picture of it. But we suspect the real thing’s going to look rather exciting.

The Hyundai i30 N TCR is important as it also gives us a little glimpse of what we might be able to expect from the final, production ready i30 N hot hatch. We’ve driven it, but we’ve not yet seen one without a smothering disguise.

We’ll see the road car over the summer, but first, we’ll get a good look at the TCR when it competes in Italy at the 24 hours of Misano over July 8 and 9. It’s a public test as Hyundai gears up to delivering customers’ TCRs in December.

Yep, like the VW Golf TCR, this is a racing car geared very much at you buying one, rather than switching on your telly on Sunday to see a gaggle of them driving round. Unlike the Golf, it’s not yet homologated for TCR, so it will run in the GT4 class. GT4 cars include McLarens, Mercedes-AMGs and Audi R8s, so don’t expect a class win.

In fact, Hyundai is taking all competition out of it by not running the car for 24 hours straight, but splitting the race into segments. There will be chassis tweaks and setup changes between each segment, to see how components wear in different conditions.

"Though we will not run continuously through the entire event, we will manage our time on track, splitting the race in several sections where we can focus on long runs and the endurance racing aspects of the our design,” says Andrea Adamo, boss of Hyundai’s customer racing programme.

“With time on track at night, as well during daylight, we can see how the car’s behavior shifts depending on atmospheric and track conditions that will be constantly changing.”

All the fun of a 24-hour race, with none of the pressure to deliver a result? We’re a bit gutted they didn’t give us a call…