Sitting at the traffic lights in your nice new Mk4 Golf GTI 2.0, you wouldn’t pay much attention when a rumbling old Mk1 pulls
up beside you. No competition of course, you think to yourself with glee, which means your phallic power is still intact -
no chance of being embarrassed in front of your girlfriend, Lord forbid. In fact, this may be a chance to impress her, by
demonstrating the wonders of modern car design technology, and leaving the old banger in a cloud of unleaded vapour.
But as the lights turn green and you launch forwards, you get an unwanted surprise. Despite flooring the pedal and pulling
away down the dual carriageway at seemingly lightning speed, you notice the Mk1 Golf slowly overtaking you. You’ve reached
60, changing up as fast as you can, but he’s already ahead of you, and you’re not gaining on him. How could this be?! You’re
driving a new car, with a bigger engine, and you’ve just been left in the dust by a car 20 years older! You try to play itdown,
backing off and just pretending you weren’t racing the Mk1 in the first place. But your girlfriend doesn’t buy it, and the
rest of the journey is spent in a brooding silence. You put it down to the fact that the Mk1 must have been modified, supercharged
or something.
This is the hard lesson some contemporary boy racers must learn. Don’t trust your eyes and ears, look at the facts and it
all makes sense. The Mk1 Golf GTI is the Godfather of all hot hatchbacks. The first car to challenge the conventions of modern
road use, bringing the word ‘fun’ into the motoring equation. Since those dizzying times in the late 70s and early 80s, the
Golfs, like all modern cars, have gotten heavier. This means you now need to purchase the Mk4 Golf with a 1.8 20v 6spd engine,
or the beastly 2.3 litre engine just to match the performance on paper of the Mk1. And even then, that’s only 0-60 times.
Compare the all round performance and the fact that the Mk1 has a kerb weight of only 845 kg, and you can see why it still
out performs the product of it’s proverbial genes. Even the made-for-rally Williams weighs in at 145 kg heavier, thus needing
a 2.0 16v engine to deliver the goods.
Read the Mk1 road test to find out why the ‘pocket rocket’ has parked itself comfortably into motoring history...
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Intro
