In that article he's effectively just not liking the car cause its not fast enough for him, Mark Hales not surprising the guy hoons round race tracks most of the time. I honestly think that
review is poor as its just comparing the new leon (base flavours) with Cupra's, well they will always be slower than the Cupra's at this stage, these are your Heinz variety models, not the high end Sport models, comapring them with the Cupra is just wrong and in my opinion bad journalism, i don't beleive he's thought about what he is testing.
Its the same car as the Altea and Toledo, abait in differing looks and some new additions, but underneath its an Audi A3, Golf 5 just like the rest of VAG's offerings. The majority of those observations could be slapped onto the Altea too.
And comparing an A3 to an S3 and a normal Skoda Octavia to a vRS.
My critisism of the car would be its similarity, to the other cars in the companies brands, the Altea, Leon, Toledo have tried to fill lots of gaps in the market, but have overlapped to much, and could likely confuse buyers. Im still not in agreement with this MPV thing, but again that could be in fault to the model overlaps again.
The car next to an Altea is far more squat, and lower looking, the roofline falls away far more than the present Leon, giving a coupesque appearance from some angles, its no bigger or ungainly than any other car in its segment.
Id agree with the Top Gear
review that if the Leon had come first in the new models line up, the confusion may of been lessened, but I would say most people here would look to the as yet unreleased performance models anyway.
Im personally looking for something with some performance, high comfort, and most importantly to me now, better running costs, the R is a great car, but it eats my money, not that i can't afford it, but i consider what i spend on it and feel i could be saving a packet in running costs in more modern car, but time will tell, test drives a plenty, im not one to jump in head first.
when I saw it I thought it was an advert for the Leon... 
