Volkswagen Golf GTI CS
GOODBYE
£37,380 OTR/£43,155 as tested/£325pcm
WHY IT’S HERE
It’s the easiest car in the world to recommend, isn’t it?
DRIVER
Ollie Kew
I HAVEN’T JUST LIVED WITH THE GTI CLUBSPORT. I’VE LIVED IN IT. This car arrived for a short three-month stint in the TG Garage, sporting 6,632 miles on its digital dashboard. I thought I might add 1,000 to that.
But what with the global semiconductor shortage delaying the arrival of other cars we’d have been testing and the world re-opening over summer 2021, the Clubsport has barely stopped.
We’ll rattle off the basics first, then dive into the semantics of whether or not this will be a car I’ll remember fondly. So, build quality. Good, but not perfect. There was a persistent dashboard buzz at motorway speeds, but it was something buried under the scuttle, not a loose piece of door trim.
As I braced my hand on the top of the freestanding touchscreen to help jab at the menus, the plastic shroud around the bezel gradually started to work loose. I’ve found other Golf owners complaining of the same niggle.
But the old-fashioned stuff: oil use, tyre wear, fuel consumption, were all beyond reproach. The CS works its Goodyears harder than the Hankooks fitted to the boggo GTI, but it hadn’t turned them to slicks over the summer.
Motorway economy was regularly over 40mpg, thanks to a seventh gear the manual GTIs do without. So, the Clubsport routinely did 3–4mpg more than the less powerful standard GTI we’ve run previously, and easily topped 400 miles to a tank, with a best of 415 before I bailed out of fuel roulette.
Whoopsies? Well, this well specced CS weirdly didn’t have electric folding mirrors. At some point, it had a tonk on the passenger side mirror which knocked the mirror cap loose. I resorted to securing it with some tape.
Colleagues who borrowed the Clubsport agreed the spec feels more complete than the standard GTI, which doesn’t raise its game highly enough when you want a quick hoon. The Clubsport is notably more tenacious and deeply, deeply fast. The other week I had a quick go in a Ford Focus ST – a 276bhp car – and was stunned how much slower it felt than the 296bhp Golf.
But... I still have bugbears. Chiefly, this car doesn’t deserve the hallowed name ‘Clubsport’, and if I’m going to be forced to have a DSG gearbox, then VW needs to code a mode to allow the driver to control it themselves.
The auto upshifts, the auto kickdown, the paddle override – all of this relegates the driver’s importance. It makes you feel like it only wants to drive on its terms. And a hot hatchback should be ever-ready to entertain.
Would a GTI be my choice in this class of car? I’m afraid that it no longer is. I’m now a Hyundai i30N man, precisely because the likes of Hyundai and Ford have now learned to make a car that’s pretty much as good at doing the mundane as a Golf, but shines brighter when you fancy mucking about.
This Golf is badly hurt by this generation’s pared-back-for-no-logical-reason interior. Now it’s legal to be sociable again, I gave lifts to mates.
The same responses always cropped up. “Is this a basic one then? Where are all the buttons? What, so I have to use the screen?” And so on.
I’ve got a couple of friends who actually own Golf MkVIIs. One’s a GTI. One’s an R. I canvassed them both to see if they’d swap. Both preferred their older car’s interior, and noted the new MkVIII isn’t that much better to drive.
But, the TopGear Garage isn’t quite done with the MkVIII Golf. We’ve got one more stopping by for a while...