Saw my first one yesterday in Pure Grey. 
Hopefully taking the OH tomorrow to see a couple of TCRs... 
Good luck Watts! About time she chopped the Lupo in for something a bit bigger and it would save you selling yours!
Are you thinking new or ex-demo?
Being as you’re not going the finance route it’s harder to recommend new versus slightly soiled.
Getting the £2k inventive then paying off the balance could bring new ones down significantly but pre-reg’d ones are getting better and better value and will undercut the new ones still by quite a few thousand.
Some have a bit of mileage on them but at the end of the day if your using it as a daily driver then it’ll have a few 000 on the clock in no time anyway and someone has saved you the hassle of running it in! Just a decent polish required to remove the inevitable swirls.
Depends on whether you can still turn up the hallowed three door in your desired spec too. They seem very thin on the ground but at least will be earlier registered cars so well away from that heinous £40k road tax which is something I really couldn’t stomach in a mere Golf (maybe if I had a company car allowance or similar I might make an exception but I really don’t think I could love a Golf enough to pay it!)
If you’re going to compromise on a five door would you not hang fire until the mk8 GTI breaks cover (no doubt undisguised leaks will start appearing soonish to see how different it is to the GTE) to see whether it would make a better very long term car.
I do think the mk7 models will become iconic like the mk5 GTI models and stay in good demand amongst enthusiasts though. I can’t see the mk8 becoming particularly desirable until the first mid-life refresh. Plain ugly or ahead of its time is a matter of opinion!
I remember back in 1992 seeing a big bumper mk2 GTI parked nose to nose with a just launched mk3 GTI and thinking that the outgoing car looked classy, timeless, integrated, hewn from solid and plain handsome versus a more futuristic but cheaply designed newcomer. I’m hoping the mk8 doesn’t leave me feeling the same way.
Unlike my Clubsport which I hardly used, I’ve been piling the miles on the TCR and can say now with confidence the 7 speed DSG has grown on me loads now that I’m familiar with the programming. I rarely move it out of D (unless I need to go backwards
) and even in the non sporty setting it copes with 99% of situations pretty well once one gets used to throttle positioning to encourage it to react how you want it. That takes a while to get used to but once you fathom out what the TCU programmers brief was it all falls in place.
There are some things I still don’t like but there were some things I didn’t like about the manual too (but they were probably more my own human limitations).
I could write an essay on how I think the TCR compares to my 2013 GTI PP but I’ll spare everyone. There are so many areas the TCR turns the GTI up a notch yet it still feels very much like a GTI not an R.
We’ll all be keen to hear how you get on with your TCR viewings
