BUYING & TUNING GUIDE MK5 GOLF GTI
BRIEF HISTORY
The Volkswagen Golf is such an everyday sight in 2021 that it’s hard to imagine a society without it. But 1974 was a very different place to the world of today, and the launch of the Golf was a staggering departure from what people thought they knew about the Volkswagen brand; replacing the air-cooled, rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive Beetle with a crisply angular hatchback that featured a front-mounted, water-cooled engine and front-wheel-drive was a frankly astounding manoeuvre. And when the GTI concept was announced at the 1975 Frankfurt Motor Show, all bets were off. This was a new era of performance city cars.
Brilliantly, the secret ‘Sport Golf’ started as a skunkworks project among the engineers; presenting it to top brass in 1975, the idea was met with widespread approval and the Golf GTI came to market for 1976: fatter wheels, bigger brakes, aero add-ons, a close-ratio gearbox and a peppery engine made it an instant classic. In the early '80s, the engine got bigger and the power increased, and the
