VW Golf R review: For a car so menacing to drive, this is a relative bargain

This is, by far, the best Golf VW has ever made — whether you want to drift at high speed around a track, or pootle around town.

Special: the Golf R

At some notional level, I understand why people might want to “track” their own, expensive cars. What they’re saying to the world is that they have so much money and so little grasp of reality that they are willing to risk their shiny machinery in a high-stakes game of Gran Turismo For Real.

The fact is that 98 per cent of human beings can do as many absurdly priced track days as they like but they’ll never get within two seconds a lap of actual racing drivers – because, unlike racing drivers, they’re not missing the vital parts of their brains marked “fear” and “self-preservation”. Still, even at semi-sensible speeds, driving a car around a race track – as I did recently in the surprisingly swift, planted and involving new Volkswagen Golf R – is hugely invigorating (and just frightening enough to be fun), particularly if you don’t own the vehicle.

From the back

Drifting, on the other hand, makes no sense to me at all. Yet I am told there are people who regularly go to Sydney Motorsport Park and pay good money to spend a few hours turning their own tyres into little burning hot donut holes of rubber and placing the mechanicals of their cars under the kind of stresses that reduce their lifespan in the same way that eating donut holes of rubber would reduce yours. Honestly, this sounds akin to buying expensive golf clubs and using them to kill cane toads, or to dig very small trenches.

Drifting a car is also quite tricky – it involves spinning your arms around at great speed while making the kind of faces you normally keep hidden behind closed doors while enduring painful bowel movements. Similarly, if things go wrong while drifting, it can be messy and embarrassing.

Normally, cars that have all-wheel drive – or 4Motion as Volkswagen likes to call it – are

not great for drifting because they’re too good at not going sideways, but the new Golf R comes with a Drift Mode that cleverly sends as much torque as possible to the outside rear wheel, which makes this taut, compact and visually alluring hot hatch almost laughably easy to send sidewise on a wet skidpan. So much so that I actually started to enjoy it, and to smile while doing it rather than grimly grimace.

Nice pipes

I was slightly surprised to hear that one of the advantages of this Drift Mode is that it also works when you leave the traction control partly on, which makes it “perfect for road use”. Essentially, you can impress your mates by being a bit sideways out of a bend, but the computers will catch you before you get into too much trouble.

The Golf R – a relative bargain at $65,990 for a car that’s so Germanically menacing to drive, with 235kW and 400Nm on offer from its tweaked 2.0-litre turbo – offers all kinds of racy, “look what my car can do” tricks like this, including a “Nürburgring Mode”, allegedly optimised for one of the world’s most-mentioned race tracks, but essentially good for any kind of track work at all.

Speaking of which, you might not think of a VW Golf as a race-circuit weapon, but belting it down the straight at 220km/h and through Turn One at 170km/h, I was struck by the thought that you really don’t need much more car than this to feel like you’re a very fast driver indeed. The Golf R’s clever new rear differential makes it hugely playful through corners, and I also loved the honesty of its “Pure” sound setting, which allows you to turn off all the fake noises being pumped into the car through the speakers and hear exactly what its raucous little engine actually sounds like.

During a week on real roads with the Golf R, I only grew to love its sharp looks and punchy personality even more, as well as its big, supportive seats and lovely Lapiz Blue paint. The vicious Volkswagen even won my wife over, at least partly. While she enthused about how it was like “driving a muscle”, we reached rare agreement on the fact that the new VW operating system for its infotainment screens is about as intuitive as picking your nose with your elbow.

Inside the cabin

That wouldn’t be quite enough to put me off wanting one of these cars, personally, but I would struggle with the non-existence of the gear-shift lever. Yes, the Golf R has lovely large paddles for shifting cogs yourself on the steering wheel, but in place of where the usual central shifter is you’ll find what looks like a modern key fob that Tony Greig has thrust deep into the centre console. It looks and feels wrong, like approaching a door knob to find it’s been replaced with something the size of a 50c piece.

I have theorised before that a fast Golf is perhaps the best answer there is to the dilemma of desperately wanting a Porsche but not being able to afford one. And this Golf R is, by far, the best Golf VW has ever made. If you get my drift.

VOLKSWAGEN GOLF R

ENGINE: 2.0-litre turbocharged (235kW/400Nm). Average fuel 7.8 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: $65,990

STARS: 4.5 out of 5