We’re into the meat of the best roads we know now, summer sun baking down on the empty, fast-flowing stretches of asphalt that’ll decide which contenders can fight for the podium. The supercars will be epic here, but it’s only fair to stick with the hot hatches for now, to give them a chance before someone opens the Aventador’s engine cover and we all go ooooh!
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Time for the GTI. Just like the last few generations, the Mk7 Golf GTI remains a front-driven 2.0-litre turbo, but there’s a chunk more torque – up from the Mk6’s 206lbft to 258lb ft – and it’s also the first time that VW has optioned a performance upgrade, offering a mechanical limited-slip diff, beefier brakes and a 10bhp boost for £980. That’s the car we’re driving.
After the Fiesta ST, the Golf initially falls flat, a noticeable shortfall of drama and tactility. The steering lacks feelsome fizz, the performance is ample rather than fulsome, the lean through corners quite pronounced. Then you turn up the wick and realise there’s still a lot of fun to be had: the turbo four is flexible and punchy and roars with intent, and the chassis is quite adjustable too, a fact illustrated when someone later comes round a very quick corner pointing the GTI straight at me with an armful of lock. There’s also strong, instant feedback from the brake pedal, the DSG gearchanges hit home with a frisky little slap, and the locking diff does make a difference, transforming surefire understeer into a clean pull into and through the corner. Soon you’re attacking the road, front treadblocks squirming and digging in hard, rear end shifting about, gearshifts blam-blam-blamming.
The GTI can still pull off the ten-tenths manoeuvres, but you just know that of all the hatches, this is the one whose appeal will endure on the daily grind: the ride quality is very good, the gearchanges seamless around town, the seats comfy, refinement excellent. I’d buy one and live with it and love it, but I can’t recommend you get the Golf when you can pick up a Fiesta ST for a bundle less cash and have more fun.
Could Merc’s first hot hatch provide the best of both worlds? Turn the key and the A45 AMG’s 2.0-litre turbo – 355bhp! – settles to a gruff idle as you settle into a beautiful Recaro sports seat. This is an amazing engine with masses of power, huge flexibility and a throttle response to shame the McLaren, and before you know it you’re absolutely pounding down the road, jinking this way and that, gearchanges complemented by a boom like a bible dropped in a monastery, and that Golf and Fiesta are shrinking in your rear-view and you just know you’d stretch that gap if it happened to rain.
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Keep up the speed, trust in the chassis and you’ll appreciate how responsive and faithful the front end is, scything through bends with total precision and succumbing to very little roll. In the faster stuff you’ll feel the four-wheel drive working its magic, power channelling to the rear, tucking you into the bend and pushing you through it. It feels both secure and rewarding. The four-pot brakes are absolutely mega too, saving the lives of at least 12 sheep today alone.
The problem is, for every plus there’s a minus with the AMG: it costs a very un-hot-hatch-like £38k, somebody’s forgotten to dial in any steering feel, the gearbox is sometimes tardy to take your call, sometimes can’t be bothered to pick up at all, and the ride is heavy-handed, leadenly battering even smooth roads into submission where the Golf and Fiesta are more diplomatic.
There have been some great AMGs in recent years, but this one just can’t live up to expectations. And these tests do tend to wreak havoc with expectations. Two years ago these roads hosted our McLaren MP4-12C versus Ferrari 458 showdown. McLaren thought they had it in the bag; we thought they probably did too. Ferrari walked it. McLaren quickly responded with fine-tuning for the coupe, and now they’re back with the 12C Spider, the first McLaren I’ve driven since that test. Like the coupe, the twin-turbo V8 now makes 616bhp (up from the early cars’ 592bhp), and because the 12C is built around a carbon ‘MonoCell’, the folding hardtop causes zero loss of rigidity and adds just 40kg.
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A hidden button means you no longer have to stroke the bodywork to pop open the door, so it swings open easily, revealing a glimpse of carbon tub like an evening dress might flash some thigh. Post yourself into the footwell and you settle into gorgeous seats, noticing the floating centre console and arm rests, the jet engine-like air vents, the scalloped indicator stalks, the fluid levels and temperature read-outs that are highlighted in business-like grey. Everything suggests strength, lightness, seriousness, the future even. You feel like Chuck Yeager performing a systems check before smashing the sound barrier.
Press the central starter button, let that deep, insistent drone of engine noise from the optional sports exhaust flood into the cabin, then pull back on the paddleshifter, engaging first gear. The engine now celebrates its industrial nature, roaring gruffly, exhaling loudly with a dump-valve whoosh when you change gear, shouting like an angry, constipated robot when you charge past 7000rpm.
Before you’re even half a mile down the road you can feel how stiff and absolutely together the McLaren is; you sense it through your backside and hands, sensations from the road surface rippling through the structure.
The 12C’s steering is more tactile and natural than the cocaine rush of the Ferrari F12, a decent bit slower, but still quick and precise and Lotus-like in its feel. Then you’re reintroduced to the way the 12C smothers the road in velvet and you just pitch into a bend as fast as you dare and sense a mid-corner bump thwack up into the chassis, the sort of thing that’d briefly tweak any other car into a snatch of oversteer. The McLaren just soaks it up, your hands stay fixed, you’re through, gone, no sweat.
The thing is, the 12C always has done this stuff well – it’s the stuff that it didn’t do well that matters. Some of the flaws have been addressed: the pointless Pre-Cog system is gone (a light pull on a paddle queued up a gear before you needed it), and the paddleshifters themselves now operate with a lighter, less obtrusive click. The overly abrupt curtailment of power when you backed off with the turbos lit has also been dialled back. All of this coalesces and makes you realise how critical fine-tuning is for an otherwise inherently right car, and you become absorbed in the driving process, marvelling at it, feeling a little teetering on the edge of understeer through some of the slower corners, noticing how the 12C doesn’t slide with the Ferrari 458’s flamboyance, that it puts its power down more cleanly but does slide with more of an easygoing fluency than I remember.
Yet problems still lurk: the pedal feel for the optional carbon ceramic brakes remains ill-defined, the throttle response could be sharper, and it’s a tardy 3500rpm before the turbos give you that still-astonishing kick in the back, smacking you down the road in ferocious long lunges that make your passenger tense and silent and unable to do anything but exhale a profanity.
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The gearbox can’t match a Ferrari’s, both in the speed of its upshifts and – more noticeably – the lethargy in its downshifts. Click the paddle twice to shift from sixth to fourth and you’ll get a swift click into fifth, but a finger-drumming wait for fourth. Combine that with the turbo lag and suddenly you have a massively powerful supercar and an overtake that’s abandoned before it’s even begun.
Final gripe: it takes ten seconds of fiddling to turn off the traction control, and you can do it only when the chassis is in Track mode. You can’t win: leave traction on and it interferes too much, turn it off and the ride’s too bumpy.
>> Click here for part three of CAR’s 2013 Sports Car Giant Test
Words: Ben Barry Photography: Charlie Magee & Richard Pardon