Like father, like son?

What, precisely, is the point of a Volkswagen Golf GTI? We’ve had half a century of them, so it should be a pretty easy question to answer. And indeed, ask the man on the street 20, 30 or even 40 years ago and he’d have no problems doing so. But now? That’s another matter entirely.

It was, of course, the Golf R wot dun it. Launched in 2009 to universal acclaim, in one fell swoop you could argue it made the role of the once mighty GTI redundant. There had been flagship 4WD performance Golfs before – the Mk.5 R32 for example – but their extra power and weight came at the expense of the fizz that made the GTI famous.

The 2009 Mk6 Golf R’s turbocharged 4-cylinder, DSG ‘box and Haldex 4Motion changed all that, moving the hot hatchback game on: whole seconds lopped off acceleration times, a ferocious tenacity on the limit and even more puppyish enthusiasm for corners than the contemporary GTI.