The Volkswagen Golf R 20 Years, a new range-topping Golf R for a limited time, is quicker around the Nurburgring than a standard Golf R.
Believe it or not (and whether you do or don’t is very much age-related) it’s 20 years since the first Golf R arrived in the guise of the Golf R32.
The latest Golf R is the R take on the Mk 8 Golf which arrived in 2020, and proved to be a bit of a disappointment. A bit like the whole Mk 8 Golf offerings. But VW is hoping to put things right with the imaginatively-named VW Golf R 20 Years. Although it’ll still have useless infotainment.
Still, a Golf R is about performance (well, sensible performance) and the R 20 (as we’ll call it for brevity) does offer a whole extra 13bhp and can get around the Nurburging some 4.0 seconds quicker than a regular Golf R,
But, to be fair, there’s a bit more than that going on, with the gearbox tweaked for more aggressive manual shifts, tweaked turbo for quicker responses and a bit of an engine blip on startup.
The R 20 also comes with the R-Performance Pack with torque vectoring rear diff, ‘Special’ and ‘Drift’ driving modes, roof spoiler, 19″ alloys, with bits of carbon fibre inside together with bits of blue R stuff.
The Nurburgring run is just an elaborate tease for a car not yet on sale which looks to be, almost, the car the Golf R should already be. It’s expected on sale soon but won’t arrive until 2023.
Capt Slow says
Come on VW, stop messing the punters about, if you’re buying a Golf R, you want a Golf R. Stop tweaking bits and messing around with a special edition to charge even more for what should be the range topper in your selection of Golf’s. And as they say, sort out the infotainment system, which is utter garbage and the cruise control software which comes fully equipped with suicide mode (Goes from 70mph to 50mph with hard breaking for no reason whatsoever) sort it out guys.