Top Gear’s Top 9: the crazy Golf edition

Still looks tremendous, doesn’t it? The hatchback-spliced-with-a-Bentley-engine is one of the all-time great concept cars. This Mk5 Golf was stuffed with the 641bhp engine from a Continental GT, the rear axle from a Lamborghini Gallardo and the floorpan of an Audi R8. It actually worked too. VW said it was good for 0-62mph in 3.6 seconds and a top speed of 202mph. Well, after they’d finished the Veyron, it was inevitable that VW’s most ambitious engineers would get bored and start to muck about in the tool shed…

Before the hideous-but-amazing Civic Type R ruined our eyes and that crazy £70k Renaultsport Megane Trophy R came along, VW was once upon a time the undisputed holder of the front-wheel drive Nürburgring lap record. 

The device it used to claim this title was the superb GTI Clubsport S. No back seats, sticky tyres, a traction-hungry front differential and suspension specifically tuned to work with the bumpy 'Ring made for a stellar lap machine. And a great road car, actually. They’ve held their value so well, they’re basically a not-very-poor-man’s 911 GT3.

A scrapyard special? Nope, the Golf Harlequin was an actual official thing that was on sale for real money. And how’s this for logic? Instead of respraying the chosen Mk3 Golfs in a multi-colour booth, VW simply built four sets of Golfs, (in teal, yellow, navy blue and red) then took them off the line and dismantled them. The factory played switcheroo with the panels, and lo, a special edition was born. Ahh, the Nineties. A simpler time.

Yep, you can keep you T-Cross/T-Roc/T-towel or whatever this week’s crossover is. VW had a better idea in 1986. Take a Golf, jack it up, and send drive to the rear wheels as well as the fronts via a low-tech but tough 4x4 system. And to think, Audi reckons the ‘Allroad’ is an original idea.

A Golf for the Golfistas – only 71 of them, though – that’s how regulated in number the G60 ‘Limited’ was. And it wasn’t just because the blue detailing made it look like a promotional vehicle for toothpaste. The G60 brandished four-wheel drive, and its supercharged 16-valve engine delivered a mesmeric 208bhp – in 1989. Each cost almost 70,000 Deutschmarks, or around £30,000 in today’s money. Wait, does that make the current Golf R a rip-off?

Not the Golf’s finest hour, this. VW decided it would develop an R version of the Golf GTI Cabrio. Unfortunately, the strengthening beams for the topless Golf’s bodyshell got in the way of the Golf R’s four-wheel drive system. So, VW junked it. And the result was a very heavy, not particularly stiff Golf developing 261bhp, but sending it all to only its front wheels. Yikes.

In return, VW wanted £38,770, at a time when the new Porsche Boxster had a naturally aspirated 6cyl engine and cost from £37,000. So, no-one bought it because it made zero sense and they’re super rare these days. Expect to see them being auctioned off alongside Ferrari 250 GTOs any day now.

Besides, VW has recently had a much better crack at making a roofless wonder-Golf. This is it: the GTI Roadster, on sale now for just £15,000. Hah, of course not. This concept looks like a Transformer that’s run out of battery (do Decepticons have batteries?) halfway through Transforming. Under the bonnet, it’s a got a twin-turbo V6 good for 496bhp and 413lb ft, carrying it all the way to 190mph, VW claimed. The reason so many of Volkswagen’s engineers are bald is because they tried to max it, apparently.

Damn you, Dieselgate. As the scale of VW’s corruption over diesel car emissions became clear in 2015, the company went into sense-of-humour lockdown and pulled the budget on projects that weren’t super-profitable or in tune with a new squeaky-clean image. 

On the chopping block was this fabulous idea: a Golf R tuned to the, erm, tune of 400bhp. Completely pointless, it was. VW Group member Audi already produced the 380bhp RS3 on the same platform, and the Golf R’s rave reviews agreed the 300bhp standard car hardly wanted for power. So, the R400  never saw the light of day, though a few mules seen testing on the ‘Ring suggest one or two test drivers out there might have got away with driving the secret super-Golf before it was nixed.

‘Course, VW’s official line was that the R400 wouldn’t be profitable, because it would have needed to cost about £50,000. But that didn’t stop AMG, did it?

Wheelarches. That is all.