Golf v Golf – Part two, the GTIs

I take the old one first. It’s like pulling on your most comfortable pair of jeans: it just fits. Settle in and find yourself instantly at home; within minutes you’re taking it entirely for granted, which is about as big a backhanded compliment as I can pay a car like this. The driving environment is so simple to understand yet all the things you really need, from CarPlay to active cruise to bum warmers are all here. The ride is perhaps a touch firmer than you recall, almost certainly due to this car sitting on optional 19in rims which don’t even look much better than the standard 18s, but it’s still pretty pliant. Deft is certainly not too strong a word.

It’s fast too: the 0.3sec difference in the quoted 0-62mph times between the cars may just be down to the diff being standard in the new car because, as with all powerful front-driven machines, the limiting factor is not the torque, but how much of it you can transmit to the road surface. And once you’re up to speed you do find yourself pondering the wisdom of buying a 300bhp Golf R, fine car though it is in isolation. To be honest, this one feels plenty fast enough as it is.

And quick through the corners too. This is where the seventh-gen GTI was always at its best. For while it is less dynamic – read aggressive – in its responses than some, it flows beautifully across the countryside, never flustered by unexpected changes in surface or camber. It doesn’t grip like a Civic Type R, it’s not one of those cars that makes your passengers break out into involuntary yelping – probably a good thing – but if what interests you more is the feel for the road, the faithfulness of a car’s steering, its willingness to tighten its line with a quick lift of the throttle, you have come to the right place.

You’re never going to laugh yourself off the road in this car, you won’t even be grinning from ear to ear as you hurtle across the countryside, but when you get to the other end you’ll sit for a while with a gentle smile on your face as you relive your journey. And unlike so many others that will only provide such pleasure in exchange for the right to beat you up as it does so, in the Golf it was so easily achieved with so little downside, you’ll want to do it all over again the next time you drive the car. And that really counts.

How different can the new one really be? It has a mildly evolved version of the same chassis, the same engine, the same transmission and the same essential suspension design. Well, we know how different because the same could be said of the first iteration of the eighth-gen GTI and we all thought it a sizable let down relative to the car it succeeded.

And there’s an important point to be made here, one I think is already becoming obscured by the mists of time. That eighth-gen GTI was never a bad car; in fact once you’d got past the then dreadful and now largely fixed infotainment system, it was a pretty good one. If we could have seen it in isolation, we’d have all been far nicer to it than we were. But it wasn’t as good as the version that came before it, and that was its undoing.

At the time I wrote: ‘Do not mistake me, I liked the Golf, just not as much as I’d expected to. It’s like those quiet, quirky kids at school always happy to do their own thing until one day they decide to conform and, by trying to be more like the others, give up something of themselves. And for a car whose character was already so distinct and charismatic, that’s a pity.’ And I stand by that today.

I like this Golf too, even more than that one. VW has done all it reasonably could within the limitations of a mid-life update to address the complaints made about how difficult the last one was to operate, with access to the ventilation controls on the home screen, buttons back on the steering wheel and a software upgrade that makes the whole system both quicker and more reliable.

But more importantly for the purposes of this test, it has also gone back and revisited the GTI’s suspension, its damping in particular, the aim being to return at least some of the breadth of ability that seemingly went walkabout last time around.

And it’s worked. By making the car just a little more compliant the effect has not been to make it somehow less fun but, instead, both easier and more rewarding to drive. Some might call it less sporting, whatever that means, and if so I welcome it. This is a genuinely entertaining car, keen as you like to wave an inside rear wheel in time-honoured fashion while keeping the nose admirably angled into the apex under anything less than the most extreme provocation. Traction is excellent too.

All I’d add is that they should have gone further still. The ride is still not good enough for a Golf GTI, worse on standard 18in rims than the 7.5 on optional 19s (the new car sitting on passive dampers and the old one on optional adaptive dampers may explain that one), and it’s still a car you drive corner by corner, dealing with one before addressing the next. That 7.5 fluency which makes a car flow down the road, the car feeling so natural it allows your brain to always be a few dozen yards ahead of the car is starting to come back, but it’s still not quite there.

Another victory for old over new, then, just as it was last week with their cooking siblings. But this contest is closer and it reveals more about the frankly unreasonable excellence of the 7.5 than it is revealing of any intrinsic failing of the 8.5. But still you know that when we look back and separate the truly great GTIs from the merely very good, these two cars will sit in separate categories. The difference is not much, just that which exists between a fine example of its art, and something truly extraordinary.

Photography by Dean Smith