Volkswagen Golf GTI - long-term review - Report: 1

There are birthdays, and then there are birthdays. The Golf is 50, which means it has reached the point in life where it should be wearing linen, playing padel and quietly Googling “high cholesterol symptoms”.

So sing happy birthday, blow out the candles, make a wish and welcome to the Top Gear Garage our new Golf GTI.

Or, more accurately, welcome back. Because the GTI isn’t really a car so much as a recurring habit in our garage. Other hot hatches arrive shouting, wearing spoilers, making noises, demanding attention and then die. The GTI has always done something more difficult. It turns up looking like a Golf, behaves like a Golf, carries stuff like a Golf, does almost 40mpg on the motorway like a Golf, and then – when nobody’s watching – goes down a good road with its little tartan trousers on fire. That is the philosophy. Not the fastest. Not the loudest. Not the maddest. Just the one you could actually live with. It’s a formula that has worked for 50 years.

Our car is the latest Mk 8.5 GTI - not a reinvention, more a public apology with headlights. The basic Golf shape, MQB bones and GTI idea remain, but Volkswagen has increased power to 261bhp, sharpened the lights and bumpers, added the illuminated nose badge and, most importantly, tried to sort the cabin tech that made the Mk8 feel like it had been designed by someone who hated fingers. There’s now a bigger 12.9in screen, newer MIB4 software and actual steering wheel buttons again. Progress, in modern car terms, sometimes means putting back the thing you should never have removed.

There’s a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine, 272lb ft, front-wheel drive and a seven-speed DSG gearbox only. It’ll do 0-62mph in 5.9 seconds and run on to 155mph. Sensible performance, which is a rarity and welcome in these days of 1,000bhp Kias.

The basic on-the-road price is £41,860. But our price as tested is £45,490, which is a big number. A very big number. Over £45k for a non-special-edition Golf GTI is the sort of sentence that makes you stare at a wall and wonder what has happened to the world. Some of that cost is down to options. The Kings Red premium metallic paint is £990 and, frankly, necessary, because a GTI should not look like a boring printer. Adaptive Chassis Control is £755, and useful, although Volkswagen gives you too many suspension increments. The rather pixelated Area View is £345. The Harman Kardon sound system is £630. A space- and weight-saving spare wheel is £315, which feels both sensible and faintly insulting, because at this money and with the UK’s crater roads, you rather hope a spare wheel might be included in the broad concept of “car”.

What it doesn’t have is the panoramic sunroof, which is £1,280 and which I already wish was fitted, because it is rather dark inside. It also doesn’t have the 19in wheels, and I’m not sure about the standard 18in Richmond alloys. They’re probably the mature choice, and may well be better for British roads, but visually they make the car look a bit apologetic and bland.

The first job was obvious. Run it in. Properly. So I pointed it north and did the schlep to Scotland. Not, I should say, because of the tartan seats. Although I would like a GTI Jacara pattern Tam o’ Shanter. More because Scotland remains one of the best places in Britain to discover whether a car is merely quick or actually useful.

The trip up was all motorway and manners. In Eco mode the GTI was smooth, quiet and weirdly effortless, just rolling along at grown-up speeds and returning around 40mpg, which is almost exactly what the official combined figure suggests. It felt slippery, settled and adult, although the adaptive cruise left a gap so large everyone moves into it, slamming on your brakes.

The ride is firm, even in its softest setting. The optional DCC dampers give a wide spread of adjustment, but even with everything slackened off there is still that underlying GTI tautness. It is not uncomfortable, but it does remind you that this is not just a Golf with red stitching. The steering has weight, too – perhaps too much in town – and some vagueness at the top end.

But the good stuff began firing off the M6 towards Moffat. Off the motorway, onto the scenic road to Edinburgh, into Sport, and suddenly the respectable accountant loosened his tie. The steering that felt a bit heavy in town made more sense there. The brakes were excellent: sharp, confidence-inspiring and easy to lean on. You could feel the front diff working, hauling the nose into corners and letting you use the power properly, rather than merely managing it, to slingshot you out. The road was lumpy, bumpy and beautiful, and on one particularly enthusiastic crest the car itself got airborne, which is exactly the sort of thing that reminds you hot hatches are not supposed to be sensible all the time. The GTI tightened itself, breathed with the surface and reminded me why this badge has lasted for half a century.

There have been some niggles already in the first month, though. A few ADAS warning lights have appeared and disappeared like ghosts, and one involuntary emergency braking moment was properly alarming, the car stamping on the anchors for no obvious reason, nearly causing the BMW behind to become a permanent part of my boot floor.

And, because every long-termer needs a baptism of inconvenience, on the motorway a truck lobbed a stone from its tread pattern straight into the windscreen. This has happened to me before in the Jeep I ran, which cracked instantly, and again with the Cayenne’s panoramic roof before that. I appear to be some sort of glazing magnet. The crack then grew overnight in the heat like it had taken a blue pill, so that’s now on the list to fix.

Still, these are early niggles rather than a verdict. The point of running a GTI is not to discover whether it can do one spectacular thing. It is to see whether, month after month, it can do all the ordinary things while still making the right road feel like an event. So far it has been a motorway car, a city car, a B-road toy, a hungover Edinburgh escape pod and a very good excuse to take the long way home.

Fifty years old, then. Still wearing tartan. Still trying to be sensible. Still not quite managing it.