Volkswagen Golf GTI - long-term review

After 7,000 miles, the Golf GTI is going home. And we gave it quite the send off.

It started at the Top Gear test track, where I appear to have spent so much of my summer, I’m scared they’re going to come at me for some council tax. If you hadn't noticed, Surrey spent most of it pretending to be southern Spain. The TG track managed 62 consecutive days without measurable rain, so despite living in Britain I’d barely driven the GTI properly in the wet.

That mattered because I’ve been hugely impressed by its Bridgestone Potenza Sports. In the dry they’re excellent, particularly on track once there’s plenty of heat in them and they seem to barely wear. But wet grip remained a mystery. Luckily we were conducting a tyre test, so somebody covered the track in water. Turns out they’re excellent there too. Even leaning hard on the front axle there was an indecent amount of grip. You keep adding steering, waiting for the tyres to give up and start washing wide, and they just don’t. Something else did surrender, though. 

After enough hard cornering, some of the wheel-balancing weights on the front right wheel detached themselves and the steering wheel appeared to have grown a massage mode. So, wheel off, new weights on. While it was in the air I also spotted some scoring on the front discs from the track work. Nothing alarming, but useful evidence that pretending your family hatchback is a touring car eventually sends you a bill.

Unfortunately, on the motorway I realised the wheel still wasn’t quite balanced properly. At motorway speeds there was a lingering tremor through the steering. Normally I’d have sorted it. Unfortunately I needed to be in Edinburgh. Which felt appropriate. When the GTI arrived with a handful of miles on it, the first thing I did was drive it to Scotland to run it in. Seven thousand miles later, I was doing the same journey again, only now the engine felt properly loosened up. It returned around 41mpg on the run north – roughly 3mpg better than when it was new.

Then came the Borders. This is where I realised I’d been slightly unfair to the GTI when it first arrived. In Normal mode it can feel almost too civilised. Light steering, soft dampers, quiet engine, obedient gearbox. Remove the tartan seats and you could almost be in a normal Golf, which is either the whole point or slightly depressing depending on your mood.

The trick is to turn everything up and push. I normally prefer a performance car with its drivetrain sharpened and dampers left soft enough for British roads. Not here. The GTI is better with everything wound tight.

Suddenly it wakes up. It bobbles over the road, the diff claws the nose towards apex and the chassis starts talking. You stop driving a Golf and start driving a GTI. And it is very fast. Not because 261bhp is a ludicrous number anymore. Quite the opposite. It’s because you can actually use all of it. On a narrow, broken B-road this thing carries momentum at a rate that would embarrass machinery with twice the power.

Which brings us neatly to Bugatti. Straight after Scotland, the Golf was once again summoned to the Top Gear Test Track for an upcoming film with a Bolide. Because one of the great Volkswagen Group boasts of the modern Bugatti era has always been that, despite the deranged numbers involved, you shouldn’t need to be a Le Mans winner to drive one. It should be as approachable as a Golf.

So we brought a Golf. Admittedly, parking a GTI beside a Bolide makes it look like somebody has left the hire car in shot. One is a 261bhp hatchback with heated seats and a decent boot; the other looks like Darth Vader commissioned a track car during a particularly difficult divorce. But there’s a point to it.

The GTI demonstrates just how far everyday performance has come. It is absurdly easy to drive quickly. Grip, diff, gearbox, electronics – everything is quietly removing difficulty. The worrying bit is that you have to be going properly quickly before the car starts feeling properly alive. And that raises the rather wonderful question we went to answer: if Bugattis were supposed to be as easy to drive as Golfs, what happens when the Bugatti is a Bolide? You’ll see soon.

As for the Golf, I retract something I said when it arrived. This is a proper hot hatch. You just have to go looking for the hot bit. Will it be remembered as one of my great long-termers? Probably not. It’s enormously competent, but not quite characterful enough. The best long-term cars develop habits, flaws and a personality. Eventually they become mates. This one never quite got under my skin.

Which makes the incoming Edition 50 interesting. It has more power, more chassis, more intent – and more money attached to it. We’ll find out whether Volkswagen has managed to add the one thing this GTI sometimes lacks: personality.