Gallery: the Hyundai i20 World Rally car at TG24

Yes it is. All part of our cunning plan to prove that there’s nothing more fun to drive anywhere than a gravel rally car. Which there isn’t. Now, race teams tend to be fairly one-dimensional. They want to go as fast as possible.

So you’d imagine that when we set TG24 up and asked Hyundai’s WRC team if they’d like to be involved, they’d have insisted on bringing the car along in tarmac trim. Faster. Nope, they totally got the concept of ‘funnier’. So here it is, charging about with enough wheelarch clearance to make a Raptor jealous.

We’ll give you the full low down on what it’s like to drive later, but the thing to remember is that small inputs make a big difference: a quick lift on the throttle, a tweak of the steering and you’re sideways. You can’t believe that a car with such long travel suspension can be so accurate or direct.

This is a set of hard compound gravel tyres. They cost around 1400 euros a set. They actually last far better on tarmac than you’d imagine. This set had done about 10 laps and although they’d got hot (it was 35 degrees outside) and lost a bit of precision, they were still 100 per cent trustworthy.

What we love is that you can see exactly how they’ve worn, how the rubber has been bullied and scuffed into crests and ridges by the forces working on it.  And this is a hard compound, the kind that might normally be employed on a tough, rocky dirt stage – Argentina maybe, or Mexico, Turkey. It’s a rough rally tyre.  

Handily, Portimao has a gravel rally stage, although it’s more dusty than rocky. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret: when we asked Hyundai to come along, we didn’t actually know Portimao had it’s own dirt stage. Promise. I only discovered it when browsing on Google Maps. No-one believes me, because they know how much I love rallying.

How can you not when you see images like this? The stage was perfect – fast enough in places to use fourth gear (it maxed out in 6th at 119mph on the main track), no trees to jump out at you, berms to hold you in, scrubby brush to make it look like you’re tackling the Safari Rally. It was a blast. The car in its element, an endless rooster tail of dust towed into the air behind it.   

It really does. After a few laps the i20 WRC looks completely authentic. Dust not only cakes every surface, vent, slat, seam, sill, arch and intake, but puffs into the air when you shut the doors. To me, this is the best a rally car can look. Actually, drying mud is awesome, too.

Go and have a look at the cars in Parc Ferme at Wales Rally GB this weekend (yes, really and no, you’re not too late) to see what I mean. Well, if there’s any chance of them drying at all.

Channels air to the driver and passenger. It’s put up here to keep it out of the dust as much as possible. Note: this doesn’t apply if you’re jammed up the tailpipes of something else. Aircon isn’t a factory-fit option. A fan, surprisingly, is.

Not as complicated as you thought, right? You even recognise some of the buttons and what they do: Start starts, and the indicators indicate. I expect the one your eye is drawn to is the slightly blurry one labelled Launch. It’s a twist dial, and allows you to choose the severity of the getaway depending on surface, temperature, engine parameters and so on.

But the two best ones are those in focus marked Road and ALS. ALS first, as you’ve probably worked out that it stands for Anti-Lag System. Basically, this keeps the turbo spinning all the time by combusting fuel and air within the turbo itself. Think of it like an jet engine’s afterburner. Anyway, it means zero lag and razor throttle response.

Road is even better. Because rally cars have to cope with public roads getting between stages, they have a Road mode with backs off all the settings for everything from the engine and gearbox, to the exhaust, throttle, ECU. When you get to stage start you simply toggle yourself out of Road into Stage and off you go at max attack.

Think of it as the ultimate one-touch Sport button. Press it and the car snaps to life in the blink of an eye, goes from placid Labrador to rabid Rottweiler. We saw exhaust temperatures hit 950 degrees… 

Yes, it has to have them, no they don’t do much. Especially once coated in dust and viewed through equally dusty windows. Why so delicate? Because weight is everything.

The car may have to meet the 1190kg minimum, but come in below that and you can ballast your car where you like. Get that mass as low down as you can, use lead plates, specific corner weights to fractionally rebalance the handling, that sort of thing.

Here are the door cards. Some sort of carbon-kevlar composite. Once again, all about minimising weight – the doors sort of clang shut. I don’t think they were looking for a Bentley-style crump.

How familiar are you with metal? Engine blocks are cast: molten metal is poured into a mould. Some components might be forged for strength: heated and shaped by pressure. The Hyundai’s engine is machined from a block: literally a big square block of aluminium was drilled and machined away to remove as much weight but retain as much strength as possible.

This is a vastly expensive process, but necessary when you’re asking a small 1.6-litre engine to develop somewhere upwards of 350bhp at continuously high revs, under huge engine pressures, tolerating massive heat and violent external impacts.

You need the clutch to set off, but apart from that you can ignore it. You won’t forget it though – it’s heavy and bites hard. Getting away without stalling is… n’t something I achieved.

The brakes and throttle are a dream to use. So responsive, so progressive. You can lock the brakes up on gravel, but you feel it the moment you have – the pedal feedback changes, you sense the wheels are now pushing the surface rather than digging into it. That’s remarkable. In fact the operation of every control is fabulous – the steering, gearchange, throttle – it all works exactly how you want it to, every time, in every condition. It makes any road car feel like you’re operating it while on your way to a Neil Armstrong convention.

A mention for the seats. They’re awesome. So well padded and enveloping, they lock you to the chassis so securely that you feel like an extra component.

This is purely gratuitous you understand. So stop reading and just look.

Because how awesome does it look?

And he really, really did.