So, how far will VW roll the dice this time? From trail-blazing featherweight 1970s original to bloated 1990s chubster, the GTI is the everyman prize-fighter that went to seed before getting on the comeback trail. The 2004 Mark 5 version, in particular, remains a Top Gear favourite, the one car above all others that truly merits that ancient car journalist and almost Confucian saying, ‘the only car you’ll ever need.’ Well, it is. Or was.
So here’s the party line: ‘New Golf GTI: faster, more efficient and cheaper to insure’. Hmm. We live in difficult times, but even so, this is unpromising. A 47.1mpg combined average and 139 CO2s is not the stuff of fizzy nether regions, which is surely what the GTI is meant to deliver. On the other hand, spend £980 on top of the £25,845 the ‘base’ model costs and you’ll get the Performance pack, which wrings roughly 10 more bhp from the GTI’s 2.0-litre turbo four (to 229), adds bigger brakes, and most importantly introduces a clever new limited slip diff. The nether regions are, er, stirring.
e’re at a private racing circuit in the south of France for an exclusive assessment; so serious is VW about its saucy new diff that there are more engineers on hand to explain it than there are journalists to listen. ‘The Golf GTI is a car that everyone, regardless of their ability, should be able to drive to maybe 90 per cent of its maximum within a few minutes,’ Karsten Schebsdat, manager of passenger car chassis tuning, tells me. Lots of wavy lines and pointing to schwimmwinkel – slip angles – certainly suggests that this is a car that can handle a whole load of abuse. ‘We did a slalom test in the GTI at 140mph, and as you can see there are no sharp curves on the graph,’ Karsten adds. Slalom at 140mph? Rather him than me.
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