Twenty years ago, the hot hatchback was in its pomp. At the entry level, brilliant little French buzz-boxes like the Renault 5 GT Turbo and Peugeot 205 GTI were fun before they fell to pieces but the real slugging match was always between VW, Ford and Vauxhall. If you were a teenager back then, clutching your freshly printed driving licence, the aspirational cars were not Capris and Mantas but Golf GTIs, Escort XR3is and Astra GTEs. I can remember as if it were this morning driving my Metro to a Vauxhall dealer and persuading some bored salesman to let me drive their GTE. Utterly unattainable, the experience left me depressed for weeks.
Then, as we know, hatches got hotter and hotter until so many were either crashed or nicked they became uninsurable and about as popular as measles. And ever since, these cars, which are better conceived to look after the day-to-day needs of the typical motoring enthusiast more than any other genre, have struggled to regain their form. There's been the occasional great - the Honda Civic Type-R and Focus RS to name two of the more recent examples - but nothing until now to suggest a sustained renaissance where it's needed most: among those cars that defined the breed all those years ago.
But now I think we may just be on the verge of one. You don't need me to tell you how good the new Golf GTI is. I've whinged for over a decade about how long this once fabled brand has been sold down the river by VW's marketing department but, having driven the latest GTI, I forgive them everything. The Golf GTi is everything the old one was - fast, fun and forgiving - but it's also a superbly civilised thing with which to live. Something, with the best will in the world, you'd not have been tempted to say about my beloved Mk1 version.
And it's taken very little time for Vauxhall to respond. The car it has chosen to take the fight back to VW is this Astra VXR and its headline numbers make compelling reading: 240bhp versus the Golf's 200bhp, a top speed of 152mph (Golf 146mph), a 0-60mph time of 6.2sec (the Golf's claim is 7.2sec to an admittedly fractionally faster 62mph) and, best of all, a price of 18,995 which quite deliberately undercuts its old enemy by precisely 1000. Is a new hot hatch king upon us?
If the pure driving experience were the only measure, I'd say undoubtedly that it was. Indeed the very fact that Vauxhall's engineers (with a lot of help from super-talents at Lotus) have been able to create a car capable of directing so much power through its front wheels alone is no mean achievement; ten years ago the result would have been a monster to drive. But in 2005 it's quite the reverse. Indeed I think the single most impressive aspect of this frankly astonishing new hatch is the fact that the engine, for all its power, is far from its best feature. What really makes this such an outstanding driver's car is the way it tackles a really difficult road.
How difficult? Well I spent an afternoon thrashing it round the original Nurburgring race track (not the Nurburgring-lite facility next door where they hold the European Grand Prix each year) and that, believe me, is the toughest stretch of tarmac on the planet. And it coped just fine, scorching through plunging twists and turns and flashing over blind crests with an aplomb many rear-drive, two-seat sports cars would be proud to emulate. Even its brakes, usually the first things to wilt under the heat of such an environment, stood up to the punishment without complaint.
In fact, if Vauxhall have made any mistake with this car at all, it is perhaps that it is a shade too track-happy, something that soon becomes apparent on a conventional road. For while it's perfectly useable everyday and just as fun off the track, stiff suspension and inconsistent throttle response can irritate in slow-moving traffic and similar urban conditions.
By contrast, the Golf, though nothing like as entertaining on the track and notably slower cross-country, would soothe and cosset you 99 percent of the time when the roads of your dreams are not laid out in front of you. This verdict is exactly what my predecessors were saying when the Golf and Astra squared up to each other when I was a callow, zit-encrusted Metro-driving teenager; it's taken 20 years but we appear to have come full circle.
Or have we? The circle, you may have spotted, is not yet complete. We are missing a member of the original trinity and we won't see it until the end of the year. But the Ford Focus ST should be worth the wait. With a 220bhp engine splitting exactly the power outputs of the Golf and Astra, it will be aiming to provide VXR levels of excitement with GTI-style refinement. And with a five-cylinder engine and the well-documented skills of Ford's RS tuning department at its disposal, I will personally eat this computer if it's not a worthy competitor and better now, I suspect, than the always slightly disappointing XR3i was then.
But until the Focus arrives, there's still a Golf and Astra to choose between. Me? I'd rather drive the Vauxhall and live with the VW. But it's hard to see how any true hot hatch enthusiast could be less than delighted by either. And that, of course, is the best news of all.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="90%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=text11 align=right>by: Andrew Frankel</TD></TR><TR><TD colSpan=2>
http://www.channel4.com/4car/road-tests/driving-impressions-2005/V/vauxhall/astra/vxr.html
