There comes a time in a man’s life when his penis stops working the way he intends it to. It no longer stands to attention in the morning, coitus requires three weeks’ notice to prepare and when you step away from a urinal, pull up your zip, it keeps on peeing. At this point in life, you probably need a sensible car, a big boot, five doors and comfortable suspension, and an automatic gearbox so you only have two pedals to worry about. Things like the 0-60 sprint become 460l of boot space, torque vectoring becomes trailer tractoring, 6-speed H pattern gearbox becomes 8-way electric memory seats and the only handbrake you pull up is the foot-rest on your Lay-Z-Boy.

But you don’t really want this, you’re reading a magazine for car enthusiasts. So, is there a way to get a family car that flies under the radar of sensibility but allows you to indulge in high-speed frivolity? You clearly need a mk7.5 Golf GTI Performance Pack in your life. Sure, a Focus ST may out-corner it or a Megane RS will put seconds on it on a track day but the fact is, the Golf can hold its own whilst being comfortable, well equipped, well built, fairly priced, retaining its value and look good whilst doing it. It remains the default choice.

But should it? I present to you the rather large, and self-inflicted, thorn in the GTI’s side - the even stealthier, but potentially far more exciting - Seat Leon Cupra R 290. The Seat Leon Cupra Gen-3 5F model is the very last Cupra badged Seat, models going forward using the Cupra moniker alone. It’s an odd trend that seems to be increasing in middle-tier manufacturers, a lack of confidence in their brand. The new Fiat 500 in particular doesn’t have a Fiat badge on any surface.

Anyway, I digress - what makes the Cupra special is what sits within its angular snout - the formidable 2.0 TSI EA888 turbocharged engine from the Golf R. However, the SEAT forgoes the R’s heavy Haldex four-wheel-drive, effectively creating a GTI-R. This means it's lighter on its feet - not to mention significantly lighter on the wallet, because the Spanish iteration listed for £5,000 less than the GTI.

What a Cupra isn’t light on is its tyres. Such power through the front wheels is more than contained by the excellent and essential differential, it's just that the Cupra is so bloody accelerative that you can’t help but giddily turn them to smoke. As fitted with the DSG gearbox, the Cupra will dip below six seconds in a scrabble to sixty from rest, and once rolling it will pull away from even the R. It still has today’s GTI Clubsport covered, and that’s before we get into the favourite VAG club past time of tuning potential. Even standard, you have to get up very early to come across a hot hatch that’ll outrun it.

So it's got the exciting angle covered, yet at the same time, it looks completely anonymous. There is a reason so many Police forces are adding unmarked Cupra’s to their fleet. It’s certainly not a dour car - you’d almost call it handsome - but Joe Public wouldn’t be able to complete a round of spot the difference with a regular Tdi on smart alloys. A petrolhead would know though. I quite like this, it almost harks back to the discretion of early M cars - you might even call the Cupra 290 a Q car.

It’s time to cue some corners though. You’ll be grateful for the gigantic brakes as they wipe off the easily accumulated speed with the minimum of fuss. The retardation is strong enough to pressure massage your kidneys, and the pedal feedback is adeptly judged - there is no front-loaded bite, just sweet progression. Even when you trigger the ABS, the kickback is minimal. Before you know it, left-foot braking becomes second nature.

The steering is of the Chornobyl variety...not great, not terrible. It’s well geared and weighted - and the nose responds to inputs with vigour - but the feedback is as evasive as a Boris Johnson office Christmas party. Because of this lack of dialogue, during acclimatisation, I kept having to make micro corrections to the steering angle. There’s zero feedback at your fingertips, and the steering weight itself is perfectly good but until I got used to the car, I found myself making micro-corrections during corners before I could find the car’s limits at about 80% ability.

Perhaps that’s a compromise for sweeter everyday manners or a method of dulling the side effects of the remarkable differential. It doesn’t so much as tighten the line, it yanks the whole car towards the apex like a Darth Vader force choke. The application of such power without any tragic torque steer is nothing short of witchcraft. Progress is always fluent unless you purposely troll the chassis or it’s wet.

I must mention that differential again - in this car is something else, it locks right when you’d want it to, as soon as the steering under hard acceleration begins to wander the diff sets it straight again. I tried to provoke und