Cars One Love Blog about cars
When Volkswagen created the GTi, it invented a whole new market segment – the hot hatch. Suddenly, no longer did you have to put up with leaky rag tops and zero practicality just to enjoy something that was fast and handled brilliantly. But the car almost never happened; VW bosses vetoed the idea, so engineers built a concept in their own time, which was unveiled at the 1975 Frankfurt motor show as the Golf Sport. It went down a storm, with orders pouring in; the GTi went on to become one of the most popular Golf variants.
When the first GTi appeared, its 1.6-litre engine generated just UObhp; by the time the seventh-generation model arrived, it featured a 227bhp turbocharged 2.0-litre powerplant.
VW management really didn’t want to build the Golf GTi; after much persuasion they signed off 5000 production examples.
So far, nearly two million Golf GTis have been sold…
