IN A SHOOT-OUT TO FIND THE GREATEST hot hatch you can still buy, it’s a shame that the car that has defined the genre for nearly five decades doesn’t make the cut. Volkswagen might not have been the first company to make a hatchback hot, but when it launched the first Golf GTI back in 1975 it turned a niche into a segment; it was originally planned as limited-edition run of 5000, but by 1983 over 450,000 Mk1 GTIs had been sold.
As we know from film franchises, rock bands and book series, not every follow-up hits the heights of the original, and certain generations of Golf GTI have under-delivered. Sadly, the long-established strengths and charms of the hot Golf are particularly hard to find in the current Mk8 GTI and R, but there is a car in our four-car final that shows what the current Golf might have become had Volkswagen’s engineers maintained the model’s focus and upward trajectory. That car is the Hyundai i30 N.
There was nothing groundbreaking about the front-drive, four-cylinder, transverse-engined i30 N at launch in 2017. Hyundai didn’t chase Nürburgring times or headline power figures, it simply fashioned a hot hatch that nailed the brief: well-made, comfortable and practical in everyday use, fast and fun one-up. Very Golf, though this shouldn’t be a surprise given that it was developed under Albert Biermann, the ex-BMW Mengineer who went to Hyundai to head up R&D.
We’ve rated the i30 N highly from the start, and the mid-life refresh in 2020 has helped maintain its appeal. If you analysed its key attributes – handling, steering, refinement, performance, etc – and plotted them on a spider chart, the resulting web would stretch evenly in all directions; the i30N is the perfectly centred, archetypal hot hatch.
It’s got
