Our Cars: Dan’s Golf GTI

I had been meaning to break out my flinty gaze, dust off my road testing trousers and really interrogate the finer points of my Golf GTI’s dynamic repertoire for some time. Or to phrase it like a human being rather than a car journalist, I’ve driven my car and thought I’d jot down some impressions.

As I did so, I thought it might be interesting to reveal something about the often artificial process behind car magazine comparison tests. To lower the veil a little. I remember conducting just such a thing between a Mk7 Golf GTI and its fizzy, razor-sharp rival from Peugeot, the 308 GTi by Peugeot Sport. It’s as good an example of the paradox I want to discuss as any I can recall.

My car is the facelifted Mk7.5 with the Performance upgrade. That means 242bhp, bigger brakes and a limited slip differential. Mine also has a manual gearbox and optional adaptive dampers, meaning it’s as driver-centric as Golf GTIs of this era got, excluding the Clubsport and TCR variants. Indeed its exact specification is why I was in such a hurry to reserve the car with a £99 deposit the moment I saw it listed among Volkswagen’s approved used stock. I hadn’t seen another quite like it.