Playing Through

The most fun cars are the ones that do surprising things; ones that subvert your expectations and lead your preconceptions down uncharted paths. We’re not talking about sleepers here – that’s a well-documented area, and a whole textbook in itself. No, what’s flicking our switch today is the idea of using a novel base to build something devastating. Like when Top Gear commissioned Lotus to build a track-slaying Lada, and the Norfolk spanner-twiddlers ended up throwing a hundred grand at it. Or when Volvo entered the BTCC in the 1990s with an 850 estate. These are not the logical cars to choose for such endeavours, which is what makes the whole concept so eminently desirable.

So it is, in convoluted style, with Paul Graham’s Golf R32. We all know what entertaining and amusing cars these are, taking the seasoned Mk4 Golf platform and sending the very essence of it down a celestial rabbit-hole, by swapping