Five cool things about this year’s Hyundai N Festival

The Hyundai N community is one of the fastest growing car scenes in the country, made extra special by the fact it’s backed and nurtured by Hyundai itself.

Every year for the past five years Hyundai Australia has hosted a national N Festival where owners can mingle, cruise, hit the track and learn more about their vehicles in a safe and controlled environment.

After the success of last year’s event at The Bend, headlined by the attendance of the Hyundai RN22e concept, the 2023 Hyundai N Festival was held at Sydney Motorsport Park and welcomed more than 1800 people and 500 vehicles through the gates across two days.

Attendees were treated to a packed couple of days of track action, tech talks, static displays, motorkhana, socialising, autograph signing and ogling at some of the latest N models coming to market.

In fact, there was so much going on we thought we’d nominate our five highlights from the weekend.

Exactly 12 months after the RN22e ‘rolling lab’ headlined the 2022 N Festival in South Australia, its long-awaited production derivative was the star of the show at this year’s event in Sydney, where a trio of pre-production Hyundai IONIQ 5 Ns were on display and blasting around the track all weekend.

The three prototypes were on hand for customer drives and hot laps available only to paying customers in the lead-up to the model’s national release next year.

carsales was able to get up close and personal with the first electrified N-car between runs and, trust us, the IONIQ 5 N is every bit as menacing in person as its on-paper credentials suggest – if not more so.

Indeed, national TCR champion Josh Buchan and Hyundai Australia rally driver Brendan Reeve mowed down countless i30 Ns, Kona Ns and i20 Ns during the hot laps – usually sideways.

One of the big talking points in the lead-up to the 2022 N Fest was the attendance of former N boss turned executive technical advisor Albert Biermann and current N brand and motorsport vice-president Till Wartenberg.

Both top-ranking executives kept their promise to return in 2023 and were available for a casual chat with owners about their vehicles, the N brand and of course the IONIQ 5 N.

We weren’t able to formally interview the pair but both passed on their love for the Australian N community and said it was an honour to see how fast the local N scene was growing for themselves, especially compared to last year.

As mentioned above, more than 1800 people attended the 2023 Hyundai N Festival, with more than 500 cars rolling through the gates across the weekend, equating to more than four times the attendance tally of the 2022 event outside Adelaide and more than twice as many cars.

Of the 1820 attendees, roughly 400 of them took to the 4.5km Brabham Circuit to let their cars off the leash and see what they could do around one of Australia’s premier motorsport facilities – just as Hyundai intended.

Even more impressive was the fact that 75 per cent of track-goers had never driven on a track before, which is where the next of our highlights came into play…

As per most N Fests to date, the track components of the weekend were run and facilitated by Trackschool Trackdays, which had close to a dozen qualified instructors on hand to coach and mentor those taking to the track.

The service was free to all registered drivers and undoubtedly paid dividends for many on the first night, when a lightning storm rolled in and the heavens opened, turning the circuit into a slippery wonderland for the experienced and a soaking, slippery challenge for others.

A new addition to this year’s festivities was the Kona Junior Driver Program, which was open to any 14-18-year-olds attending the festival and looking to get a head start on their driving education.

The teens were ushered around Sydney Motorsport Park’s figure-of-
eight circuit by professional driving instructors in new Hyundai Kona Hybrid and Kona Electric, in a sort of pre-learner’s permit clinic to help them get an early grip on basic vehicle control.

About three-dozen young drivers put their name down for the free tuition and got behind the wheel at the festival – something parents were all too happy to see.

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