The man in the street, whoever he may be, possibly still thinks that the fastest car in the Volkswagen Golf range is the GTi. Well, more fool him, because as you and I know the R is a very much hotter hatch.Try as you might, you can't have a GTi with more than 227bhp (and then only if you buy the optional Performance Pack) unless you modify it or pay someone else to do so. The R produces 296bhp straight out of the box and is therefore in a different performance league.Not long ago, an engine like this would have been a devil of a thing in a car like the Golf, but current technology means it's a pussycat when you want it to be. Round town it operates happily at not much more than 1000rpm, and although you can detect some turbo lag when you start pushing harder there isn't a great deal of it.Even so, attempting to transfer that sort of power to the road through the front wheels could well lead to unpleasantness. So the R, uniquely among current Golfs, has four-wheel drive, and that solves every potential problem. There is never a sense that any tyre is struggling even when you stamp on the throttle pedal in the middle of a tight bend, and some brief research suggests that losing traction from a standing start on dry tarmac is all but impossible. Yes, there was a whiff of overheated clutch lining, but no wheelspin.Any car must have a handling limit, and in the case of the Golf R it's understeer, which comes in earlier than it might do thanks to a slightly over-soft front end. You can dial this out to some extent by selecting the excitingly named Race mode, which increases the damping to a useful if not quite sufficient extent, and also gives the car a new and stirring exhaust note. If you thought a four-cylinder turbo could never sound interesting, wait till you hear this one.Even with Race selected and on optional 19" wheels as fitted to the test car, the Golf R rides not too badly, something Audi might like to make a note of. The ride is better if you switch to Normal but worse if you choose Comfort, which makes the car too wobbly and isn't comfortable at all.There's a fourth mode called Eco (probably not of much interest to R customers, I'd have thought) and a fifth called Individual which lets you choose your own mixture of settings.Rs with DSG semi-automatic transmission the gearchanges are much sharper than manual ones, and there's a launch control function which brings the 0-62mph time below five seconds. Still, there's more to life than that, and the manual box can get from one gear to the next more rapidly than its slightly clunky shift quality might lead you to believe.The R has plenty of competition, but the four-wheel drive gives it an inherent advantage of nearly every other similarly sized hot hatch. Add in a superbly capable engine and nicely judged (if not absolutely ideal) suspension and you have what I believe to be the best medium-sized hot hatch on the market at present. Engine 1984cc, 4 cylinders Power 296bhp Transmission 6-speed manual Fuel/CO2 40.9mpg / 159g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 5.1 seconds Top speed 155mph Price £29,900 Details correct at publication date
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