SONATA N LINE V STINGER

MY VERY FIRST job in motoring journalism was almost my last. Back in 1998, the title I worked for took a bunch of the newest and freshest performance cars and set up an informal race from sea to sea across the UK. The star of the show was the Nissan Skyline R33 GT-R, marking the very first time a GT-R had been officially imported to those shores. Cars were allotted to drivers by drawing straws. The short straw, in effect the joke car, was a Hyundai Pony. The GT-R was billed as ‘the car that almost drives itself’ due to it being packed with so much processing power which, by today’s standards is probably on a par with my garage door opener. I managed to prove otherwise by driving it into an Armco barrier, but that’s another story for another day.

If you’d have told me then that one day I’d be driving a Hyundai sedan with more power than the jaw-dropping Godzilla, I’d probably have laughed in your face, but here it is, in the form of the latest Sonata N Line.

I also laughed when asked if we should include the Sonata N Line in our Hot Source section. Hell no, what do we want that in there for? The more I considered it, the more I wondered whether perhaps the joke was on me. Here was a car that was affordably priced, stacked to the gills with gear but which would conceivably dip into the fives to 100km/h on a decent