Anyone who read last week’s test of two mid-range VW Golfs – one a facelifted seventh-generation car, the other a brand new and therefore also facelifted eighth-generation car – and thinks on that evidence alone they can guess which way this one is going to go should consider the following: the Golf and its underpants-on-the-outside-of-its-strides wearing GTI alter ego have rarely trodden exactly the same path.
The first Golf was a fine car, the first Golf GTI an absolute landmark in automotive history. The second Golf was good, the second GTI a true great. The third Golf was class leading, the third Golf GTI class trailing. The fourth Golf was so good we’ve got an ‘Underrated’ feature coming about it (but not until Ti has been Golf-free for long enough). But the fourth Golf GTI? Pur-leeze. The fifth Golf was a decent step up, the fifth GTI the single greatest leap from zero to hero in GTI history, before or since. And so on.
It is true that the eighth-gen GTI was criticised, not least by me, when new in 2020. A car that had for years been proud to do its own thing and been the best fast hatch with which to live – even if not quite the best to drive – had turned into a me too hatch, one that gave all that up to try and be as rewarding on a decent road as a Focus ST, then failed even to do that. But this one has been reworked, not just with the inevitable small increase in power, but also in less headline-worthy yet far more important areas such as its suspension tune, a move clearly designed to retake some of the ground it chose to give up at the beginning of the decade.
