and they would be quoting "V-TEC" till the cows come home too probably, and fair play they are fantastic engines
can i say my 2p worth. the mk1 & mk2 golfs are iconic. and yes you prob could make them as fast as a civic type r. but as people have already said its not about how much power you've got its how much you can use. i should know this coming from the class i race in. anything goes from novas with std 2 litre 8v engines upto things like 106's with the likes of 300+ bhp redtops / duratecs and even a few 250 bhp + type R lumps. and to be honest its not uncommen to see a few lower powered well set up cars beating the high powered ones. you could spend thousands getting a vw 16v upto around 220 bhp or you could just buy a newer safer more reliable civic type r that you know will pass the mot for a few years to come. please dont shoot me down as i love the early golfs
There's a fairly strong population of Type-Rs in my area, so I quite often get to have a play with them. Have to say I've always been generally unimpressed with them & feel they're very much over-hyped as a performance machine. My G60 mk2 jetta (4T 'box, stanbdard charger, ecu etc) would simply walk away from them. Much to the civic driver's constenation, of course. I've currently got a mildly tweaked kr corrado, which although slower than the jetta, I suspect it would prob still fair fairly well against the type-r masses. I've driven quite a few cars over the years, & keep coming back to the mk2 because they're generally just all-round awesome to drive, & with some relatively cheap, well chosen mods they just get better. Plus they're sooo easy to work on! For the record, out of all the normal VAG engines, I have to say the G60 was my favourite. Was almost on a par grin-wise with my shouty 10V UR quattro. Just my 10 pence worth..
I also have driven a type r some 5-6 years ago when my friend bought one brand new All i can say i was unimpressed! All that hype, bla bla bla..... It was a nice car to drive, excellent gear change, good brakes and a very keen engine, but i still claim, i was unimpressed!!! I expected more At that time i had a striped out valver corrado with only circa 150 bhp but sorted in handling and braking department and the only time my friend pulled away from me was on very long straights Even he was puzzled, but when we worked out power and torque to weight ratio of his type r which was fully dressed and my valver corrado which was striped out, there was only about 10-15 bhp in his favour! And yes i claim my "ancient" corrado handled better and NO i'm not beign biased! Dont know what is the big deal of believing that older dubs with some well chosen mods can still keep up with modern machinery And by god if anyone ever say again that styling of modern cars is better than of the old dubs i'm going to puke right now Type r new shape looks like a steam iron Shape before looks like a door wedge Sorry for rambling but i like to speak my mind
The Renault clio wasnt released until 1990 so it wasnt doing all that much in the 80s renaults answer to the Mk1 Gti was the Renault 5 Turbo and what a awfull car that was.Ok the R5 may have been quicker but that was a tin with a engine in it.. .The Honda civic CR-X was hondas hot hatch came about in 1983 a whole 6 years after the mk1 and on paper the mk1 was a second faster but still hondas do make great engines.My point in my other post was just adding that there is a big age gap and of course its being discussed by us were in a Golf Gti forum.The Mk1 Golf Gti was the first of its kind and came well before the rest it is the best hot hatch of its time regardless of how fast it was a Clio or a Honda will never be a cult car like the Golf the germans are always well ahead of the game when it came to cars
Golf Gti is an icon, full stop. However i seem to remember reading somewhere that Talbot Sunbeam made a hot hatch before Vw turned Golf into one Was it not rear weel drive and done with help from lotus? and also Vauxhall chevette did a hot one Hs230 or something
The lotus sunbeam was produced from 1979 to 1981 it was rear wheel drive the chevette HS was made in 1976 to 1979 thats the info i got when i google them anyway.The Mk1 Gti was about in 1975 but i think it was the 1600cc that came first with the small back lights pretty rare dont see many...
I'll keep saying this,at the end of the day,its mostly down to the driver.No point having a quick car if you cant drive it to its full potential. Ive seen my mate drive Knockhill Race track in a 2.0 16v Nova thats stripped out and set up with nothing but bigger brakes,a ****ty lowering kit and a home made roll cage and hes passing cars that should be lapping him.Its maybe not as quick as them on the straights but come to a corner and thats where the magic happens.Hes got bottle and they poof it. I once let him borrow my old 313bhp Pulsar that was on Konis,caged,strut braces front and rear and a set of High-spec 4 pots.It was his 1st time doing knockhill and the only laps he had done was 2 warm up laps in his XE Nova on the same day. Nothing passed us and the only car keeping up was an M3 CSL.Stats on paper say the M3 CSL shouldve killed us,nah,was now where near passing.Spoke to the owner afterwards and he was pretty impressed. So really,any 1 can have a fast car,but not every1 can drive them properly.
Definitely. Had a tag a long with a tuned 04 Scooby (spat flames and looked like it had ran over a drainpipe where the exhaust was) over a proper 5 mile B road twisty and mostly uphill. He wasnt rubbish at driving and I was still on his tail at the end. Couldnt have left him if I was in front tho'. Think he was gutted at a grubby old green golf doing that as I saw the car rolled onto its roof on the same road 2 weeks later. It killed my brake pads mind you.
Can't knock french hatches really. They picked up the gti mantle, ran with it then threw it back in vw's faces in the 90's. Now, they're the only ones producing a gti thats made in the same mould as the original. Light, nimble, affordable and capable of shaming much tastier machinery. As for drag racing as a benchmark-please. Unless the times are recorded on the same day by the same driver then they're as relevant as comparing milk wth badgers. Same goes for road or track driving really for all the driver variables mentioned above. You want something to beat a new hot hatch, then be prepared to spend on mods and compromise its daily usability. The new stuff is very capable out of the box and will do so in comfort with toys to boot. Me, i don't care if the new typre-r26-gti-whatever is the fastest, most reliable, most capable car in the world, i'd genuinely much rather be driving an old golf. The day i move on from hatches i'll move out of the segment and into something like an elise/exige
Nice analogy. Like it. I doff my hat to you sir As an aside, I once had a little race with a badger whilst out 'rallying' around Portsdown hill in my golf. They're quick off the mark, but haven't got much in the top end. A bit like cyclists in that respect.
Never said it was perfect, just said it was a quantitative way to compare cars, rather than quantitative ones which have otherwise been mentioned. When someone starts a debate on what the best car is, then another person says that the lesser car can be quicker than the better car because its driven better.....doesn't really leave us in such a good position? Realistically it would be difficult to get same driver times across different cars. But same day is perfectly possible. Side-by-side if you want. Also, once you've actually done RWYB a few times, you'll realise that after the initial learning curve, times become quite consistent. Different drivers? Take a sample of a number of different cars. Its funny how people shy away from the 1/4 mile benchmark as a measure of car performance. I think its better than a rolling road dyno, since these machines vary their readings so much between different installations, some are artificially high for commercial reasons too....
1/4 mile is better than dyno I think, real world speed. Lap times show more than just acceleration but there are so many variables it's difficult to compare car to car if the drivers are different/weather etc etc
Cant remember the last time i was on a 1/4 mile straight road. I think its quite biased to be honest. Cars with launch control etc will do better and some cars really aren't designed for quick off the line starts. ie relatively heavy 16v cars whos in gear acceleration is much better. Also i saw a top gear the other day where an M3 was a couple of car lengths quicker than an S4 quattro over a 1/4.. but the quattro was over a second quicker round the lap.
Exactly - my old bus can show an EP3 TypeR up, but I'm sitting in bucket seats with no carpet, no stereo etc etc Not long after we got mine on the road with the VR6 conversion I was tootling along the A45 somewhere near Wellingboro' and followed a type R off an island, he accelerated enthusiastically into the outside lane so, I followed.... We got up to a certain xxx speed and he was just in the way, so I flashed him and went by. My girlfriend has a remapped ED30 Mk5, it's quicker than my old shed, has heated seats and all the creature comforts you'd expect. We have a local benchmark test around here, where we accelerate up a hill to a bridge about 1/4 mile from an island, it doesn't matter if you try and go around the island on 2 wheels screeching and sliding or just gently go around picking a straight clean line on the exit. Remapped ED30 is 10mph faster than my car in that distance. My car is about 5-7mph faster than a stock Focus ST & Clio 182 which was (very impressive) it's a bit of fun but gives a good indication on the comparitive performances on the road... BMW M6 + 20 mph faster than my mk2 VR6 in the same distance... [:^(]
I spent a morning on the strip at Santa pod in my car, did 10 or so runs which varied by a second. It's all in the start and the 1st 60ft. Make a crap start and your time will suffer. I'm sure with a better start technique I could get very low 14s,( best so far 14.3 @ 96) But with a fluffed start I had a couple of runs 15+ = rubbish.
Cars with launch control won't do any better than a properly driven car without it. Of course, you could argue that the launch control 'makes' the car a better/faster car and this is duly reflected in the 1/4 mile posted times (of course unless a GOOD driver drove the car without!) Can you explain how weight only affects acceleration from standstill, while it seemingly doesn't affect in-gear acceleration??? I fully agree it doesn't measure anything to do with cornering grip or ability. Hence the other measure would be a consistent test track and driver. I would love to see a Top Gear feature where a bunch of 'modern' hot hatches are pitted against a bunch of older, modified, Golf GTIs, but I suspect it won't happen!!! They did do a couple of similar features. One was pitting a modified Peugeot 306 with V6 conversion (chavved up) against an old modified car (which had a small engine but was considerably lighter)' another was when they used a Renault Avantime and tried to modify it to get better and better lap times. Unfortunately both features never showed a well modified car in its true light (IMHO).
Of course, the good thing about Santa Pod is you could look at the timing slips and see that - you could look at 60 ft - 1/4 mile difference in time and so long as your gearchanging is consistent (and the grip is underneath you by 60ft) then these should be consistent.
Performance box from racelogic is a very usefull little toy for testing cars capabilities I use mine regularly on all my cars It will give you info on all your usuall kinds of tests like 1/4 mile, 0-60, 0-100 ect but i very much like midrange measurements like 30-50, 50-70 ect as well as g-force readouts Allot of fun using one and gives true representation of a car in real world driving, ie roads near where you live and where most of our road legal cars spend their time
