The Hyundai i20 that took Haydon Paddon and co-driver John Kennard to victory at the 2016 Rally Argentina is a fully wild ride.

HOW did it come to this, being strapped strapped tightly into the navigator’s seat of the only car have taken a New Zealander to a World Rally Championship round win?

Sitting beside the guy who drove it to that amazing Argentina 2016 victory?

I’ll get to that. But first … wow WHAT a car!!

The i20 WRC was designed with the sole purpose of covering the world’s most challenging and varied roads with as much speed and control as possible. From my view, mission accomplished.

Class regulations of the day demanded a 33mm air intake restrictor it still carries. Despite this, the 1.6 litre turbocharged four cylinder punches out 224kW of power and 400Nm of torque.

With the rise of increasingly more powerful road cars in the last few years, the numbers alone don’t strike you as being terribly fast.

Frankly, it doesn’t sound like a lot in this day and age, especially for what is the pinnacle of World Rally Car construction.

It’s certainly a far cry from the Group B monsters of yesteryear. Keep in mind, a GR Corolla off the showroom floor makes exactly the same power and torque from its 1.6 litre inline three cylinder. A rally flavoured, turbocharged coincidence? I think not.

But let me tell you, when that 300 horsepower is being used to full effect, and with a now twice-crowned European Rally Champion behind the wheel, it makes you wonder if there is anything else that could even come close to how quickly this i20 can devour a rally stage, or indeed, anything remotely resembling one.

Whilst it might lack some of the road going car’s niceties - so no air conditioning or sat nav - I challenge you to notice their omission whilst hurtling down a gravel road at the borderline insane speeds this thing can muster. Besides, who needs sat nav when you’ve got a co-driver?

An FIA spec rollcage, hydraulic handbrake, and a Ferrari-esque Motec screen for the passenger to monitor all the cars vitals are standard fitment inside a shell that looks all the more outrageous with the massively flared guards. Everything in an unmistakable bright blue and orange livery.

For me however, the most impressive thing about this car, even one filled with countless incredible feats of engineering, is the suspension.

I have driven all manner of road, track and even off road cars, both production and race spec. Yet nothing I have experienced has even come close to the composure offered up by this car.

The combination of generously long travel, relatively soft spring rates and meticulously well-tuned dampers means that, if you weren’t looking at the massive bumps you were going over, or how that wheel was indeed completely off the side of the road, you would be none the wiser, and simply think the course we hit and dazzling speed was a nice smooth gravel track. When it was anything but.

It’s hard for your brain to comprehend how what it is seeing doesn’t translate into what it feels. You know you should be getting jolted in your hard mounted bucket seat, yet the impact never arrives. It is as if the car sees these obstacles and simply doesn’t bother notifying you of them, for it is almost totally unaffected.

Needless to say, the quick, precise, almost telepathic inputs from Hayden Paddon undoubtedly do much to settle the car, yet as soon as we drove out of the service tent to warm the tyres, I was immediately struck with how surprisingly comfortable and supremely composed this car was.

Rolling up to the start line, we sink into tracks cut by cars that have already launched at full blast off up ‘the hill.’

Which is? Well, just the country’s most famous rally sprint course. The one in Canterbury used annually for the Ashley Forest Rallysprint.

With a pluck of the gear shifter, we’re now in first gear, accompanied by the unmistakable “thunk” of a dog gear engaging.

Hayden quickly turns a couple of steering wheel mounted dials, adjusting the gearbox, engine and diff settings to put the car into maximum attack mode.

As he rotates the final dial all the way, lighting up all five lights and activating the maximum level of the anti-lag system, the car audibly changes its note to a deeper, harder edged, more threatening tone.

The hairs on the back of your neck stand up as Hayden presses the “start” button on the steering wheel. He holds the handbrake, lays into the throttle, building boost, carefully releasing the clutch to find its bite point, before finally releasing the car up the hill.

To say it explodes off the line would be an understatement. Never before has the cacophony of noise associated with putting power down on a loose gravel surface ever been accompanied with the rapid rise in speed like I felt now, being pushed back in you seat like this was, for me at least, usually reserved for a dry, grippy tarmac surface.

As we power up the hill, accelerating through the closely stacked ratios of the six speed box, we find ourselves going through fourth, fifth, and into sixth gear as we rocket up towards the first proper turn.

I quickly realise that the aerodynamics aren’t just for show, and neither are the brakes, as in what seems like an impossibly short space of time, Hayden has pulled the speed back and turned into the first proper uphill corner.

This brings me to my next realisation, which is that by the time you make the corner, if you haven’t turned in already, you’re either not going fast enough, or you’re not making the turn.

Fortunately we had neither of those problems, as Paddon has set us up expertly, the preamble before the turn already completed, the car pitching in with unbelievable levels of grip and control, as if this was just a Sunday drive for him (It was Sunday, come to think of it…).

The throttle already hard down before we make the apex, the four wheel drive system and diffs making light work of throwing us out the other side as if we were a ball in the hands of an MLB pitcher.

The throttle doesn’t get a rest as we dive into the next turn, powering through and out the other side. We make our way through the next couple of lefts and rights, with barely a dab on the brakes, I’m not convinced to slow us down, but more so to transfer the weight of the car and get us into the next turn even more briskly.

Coming up to the hairpin at the top of the course, there’s a Scandinavian flick in before grabbing just a touch of the handbrake, helping to quickly get the rear of the car rotated around.

Once again, before we make the apex of the turn, the throttle is already down, the car and driver both working together to fire us down the road towards the final few high speed turns.

Flying down to the dipper, the front splitter and rear wing really make themselves apparent, giving us what seemed like an impossible level of grip as Hayden turns the car in, hands practically straight ahead as we come through the middle of the turn, only coming off of straight ahead for small, quick corrections before the car has any chance to do anything other than exactly what he wants.

And just like that, we round the final turn, spraying gravel and dust out in a huge plume behind us, and cross the finish line.

The time? Comfortably under a minute, but with better yet to come later in the day.

The 37-year-old South Cantabrian won but it was hard fought against Rotorua's Sloan Cox. Paddon’s fifth title win in an event he watched on TV as a child, first contested at the age of 14 and won it on his second attempt in 2011 was achieved with a margin of 0.11 seconds.

I can’t thank Hayden, his team at Paddon Racing Group, and Hyundai New Zealand enough for this incredible experience, which came as a total extra element to our primary objective: To make the video, also on this page.

As you’ll see, our film is not just about the WRC car but also focuses on Hayden’s other ‘ultimate’ weapon, the Kona EV and latest developments (including the exciting new hydrogen refuelling rig).

Had all gone to plan, I’d have ridden in the electric car. But it developed a fault that took it out of the running. That’s when ‘Plan WRC’ rolled out. How lucky am I, right?.

I doubt I will get the opportunity again to go that mind-blowingly quick on gravel, and certainly not in the hands of a master at their craft.

It’s easy to see why Hayden has been taking on the world and handily showing them his tail lights, and it was an honour and a privilege to be able to come for a ride with him, especially in such an incredibly important piece of New Zealand’s rich rallying history.

He'll have his 2016 WRC Rally of Argentina winning car out at the 2025 Otago Rally next month, and be driving it on the iconic Kuri Bush stage.

If you have the opportunity, I strongly urge you to get out and see it.

You will not be disappointed.

Thanks to Tayler Burke for additional photography.