VW GOLF GTI
A QUICK DRIVE, STRAIGHT INTO THE ROUGH WHO: OLLIE MARRIAGE, MOTORING EDITOR
I had one once. Just a small catch: my Golf GTI had a boot. A Jetta GTI. Cheaper to buy and insure than a MkII Golf, it was the fastest car I’d ever owned. Which I did for two months. On the way home from a party, four mates in the car, catastrophic understeer, mighty oak… Soft undergrowth prevented that interface by six inches. The next day I put it up on ramps to clear the greenery (and avoid awkward parental questioning), only to discover catastrophic, MOT-unsalvageable rust.
THERE’S JUST NO PLEASING SOME PEOPLE WHO: ANDY FRANKLIN, CREATIVE DIRECTOR
I bought a MkIII Volkswagen Golf 16v once. Impressive in a straight line and the build quality was extremely high for a modern-day hot hatch... but apart from that it was one of the most disappointing cars I have ever known. Why, you ask? To put it very simply, the bloody thing rarely, if ever, wanted go around a corner.
FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON ME... WHO: CRAIG JAMIESON, SUB-EDITOR
My first impression of the then-new MkVI Golf GTI was, “Well, this is boring.” My editor’s first impression, when I told him what I thought, was “Craig, you’re a complete berk.” He ordered me out onto a racetrack and told me not to come into the pits until I understood just how much of a berk I was. So I pushed harder than I ever would on the road, then harder still, finally discovering – and utterly bemused by – just how deep the GTI’s talent pool was. And that’s what the GTI gets right that so many hot hatches get wrong: if you cruise, it’ll fool you into thinking it’s not a proper hot hatch. Well, it fooled me...
WELL, AT LEAST THE CRASH WASN’T DUE TO WILD TURKEY WHO: STEPHEN DOBIE, DEP ED TG.COM
I joined this industry just as the MkVI GTI launched. After the sublime MkV, it was quite a big deal. So I spent a whole afternoon persuading my then-editor into giving me the freshly arrived test car for the weekend, before driving it out of the car park and promptly into a pheasant. Bollocks. It sounded like I’d punched a hole in the grille, but the car was – thankfully – in perfect fettle. The bird, less so.
HE LIKES BIG BUMPERS AND HE CANNOT LIE WHO: CHARLIE TURNER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
When I was 20, I badly wanted an oak green metallic MkII with the big bumpers and the BBS alloys. I ended up with a blue small-bumper 8v. Oh well, at least it was totally bombproof. I still want a 16v now – such a great-looking car and practically hewn from granite.