New Skoda Superb Sleeper Edition review: a rocket ship in disguise

Verdict

On the surface, it looks like a regular Skoda Superb Estate… but don’t be fooled. Beneath its familiar exterior lurks a 477bhp engine and a tuned 4WD chassis that make this ‘Sleeper Edition’ Superb one of the fastest real-world cars money can’t buy. Intrigued? Then read on…

The only giveaways are the slightly lower ride height and fractionally wider tyres, otherwise you could easily mistake this Sleeper Edition Superb for a regular Skoda estate, albeit one that sports an unusually posh-looking dark green paint job. But looks, as they say, can be deceptive.

This one-off Superb Estate has been commissioned by Skoda UK to celebrate 23 years of the model, which as of now is no longer available in third-generation form, with the fourth-generation model already having gone on sale last summer. 

It’s what’s known as a Sleeper car or a Q-car in old money: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as was originally written in the Bible’s Sermon on the Mount (beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing). 

Its 2.0-litre turbo engine has been tuned by Swindon-based RE Performance to produce a whopping 477bhp at 6,035rpm, alongside 661Nm. To achieve such eye-watering outputs, RE has fitted a much bigger Garrett PowerMax Turbo, plus a performance intercooler kit and a custom-made exhaust. Although no official performance figures are available, take it from us… this car is somewhat quicker than it looks.

The chassis has also been comprehensively modified by RE to make the Sleeper Superb handle corners – and stop – with every bit as much conviction as it goes in a straight line. 

You can spot the lower ride height if you look closely, RE having fitted new springs and dampers all round and much bigger AP Racing brakes at each corner. But on top of this, you’ll also find a fat, sticky, 19-inch Yokohama Advan A052 tyre nestling within each wheelarch. Together with the upgrades to the engine, exhaust, brakes and suspension, these provide the icing on the cake. One that already benefits from the standard Superb’s Haldex four wheel-drive system.

Visually – and audibly – the Sleeper is endearingly subdued. It wouldn’t be a Q-car if it had a mad exhaust and racing stripes along its doors, but the sound it doesn’t make is particularly subtle. Until you give it some beans, you’d have zero idea how potent this car is, or how fast it is when full boost is unleashed. Again, that’s all part of the Q-car appeal. Most of the time, most people will have no idea what this car is capable of.

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Even the interior provides few clues to its potential. Open the door, climb inside and you’re greeted by the same high-end cabin that greets any other Superb Estate driver, albeit one that’s been specified with the most luxuriant Laurin & Klement interior options. The leather on the seats might be high in quality and strong on comfort, the boot space as vast and impressive as it is in any other third-generation Superb Estate, but even once you’re behind the wheel you still have no idea what lurks beneath. 

Not to begin with – to a point where you could easily transport your family around in this car (including all their luggage) and not one of them would have a clue how quick it is, although they might wonder why you always have to find a petrol station with 99 octane petrol. This alone is pretty much the only real compromise demanded by the Sleeper’s highly tuned but, otherwise, pretty normal feeling and sounding 2.0-litre turbo engine. 

So finally you find a quiet, ideally dry stretch of road, with nothing but yourself and your conscience for company. Casually you press the drive mode button to the right of the gearlever to select sport. Maybe you decide to nudge the gearlever over to the left, out of D, so you can work the gears manually via the paddles at the same time. The instant you press sport mode you notice the engine downshifts one gear automatically, the throttle map having altered alongside the map for the exhaust, the DSC system and the seven-speed dual clutch gearbox. Even so, there is still no great sense that you’re sitting inside anything other than a well specified, perfectly refined Superb Estate.

But then you put your foot down in third gear, the boost builds seemingly in half a heartbeat and – badoosh – all hell is let loose from beneath the bonnet, with the Sleeper catapulting you at the horizon as if it’s just been unleashed from the far end of a NASA-spec bungee cord. The sense of acceleration is instant and very, very strong. The sound, though, is still weirdly subdued – there’s no eruption of exhaust bangs or crackles as all the beans are unleashed from the tin. 

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Instead, you’re just sucked towards the horizon by an enormous but near-silent force until the rev limiter intrudes (which is very easy to hit by mistake, so fast do the revs build even in fourth gear). At which point, you’ll want to flick the upshift paddle and the madness will continue, seemingly at the same rate no matter which of the first five gears you happen to be in at the time.

The first time you experience the Sleeper on full reheat it’s actually quite shocking, because even though you are expecting it to be quick having read the spec sheet, there is no way you expect it to be this quick. Or, indeed, this good at being able to dump all its power on the tarmac, and accelerate so hard with such little drama. 

Yet you quickly become addicted to its thrust and, inevitably, you soon want more of it. After a while longer you realise that the best range is between 3500-5000rpm in a high-ish gear; that’s when the effects of all 661Nm of torque feel most devastating. This is when the Sleeper appears to go hardest of all. It really is rocket ship-fast in the mid-range. So much so that it could, you suspect, embarrass most badly driven supercars across country given how incisive its chassis also is, without which you’d never be able to put all that power so efficiently on to the road below.

And in the end it’s probably the chassis, rather than the engine, that defines the Sleeper, and makes it so unusual. Lots of tuned cars have powerful engines, but not many of them are able to deploy that power so properly, and turn it into such usable, real-world performance. But the Sleeper puts all of its 477bhp on the road with such ease – and still feels so composed in the process – you come away from it wishing it had 600bhp. Because you know the rest of the car could take it.

For a one-off skunkworks car, it is some statement. It’s also some high note for the third-generation Superb to go out on. Not that you’d have any idea how high it can go or how fast it is – or how good to drive it is, period – unless you were told. And that’s just how it should be with a great Q-car. Under the radar. On the QT. In a place where most folks neither know, nor care about.