*update*
For anyone remotely interested in how it compares to the other mk7's I owned in the driving stakes I decided to take the car for a little run out in the early hours of the morning before the sun came up and the half asleep commuters clogged the roads.
Just in the name of research for you lot of course.
I'm no journalist that's just half read the press pack, nodded off through a talk by a VW bigwig and then been let loose under stage managed conditions in a press fleet car. No, I'm just a boring middle aged pen pusher that has a bit of a thing for lightly warmed over VWs. But I might accidentally use a few hackneyed motoring journalist cliches just for effect!
To be perfectly honest I brought the GTI home on Saturday morning, parked it up and have hardly moved it since and that's fairly typical of my vehicle use a lot of the time. Hence why I'd previously decided it was high time to stop wasting so much money on new and newish cars that I hardly used and which depreciated like falling stones so I bought a nice sensible highly discounted GTD for those odd days I did actually need a five seater car to do a long journey in.
There are a few roads near to me that are quite nice driving roads when there are no other cars about. You can't go that fast on them but there's just enough bends and swoopy bits to give you a bit of a challenge and chance for the car to clear its lungs a bit.
One road I used quite often in the early morning to get some miles under the GTD to loosen it up a bit is quite close to where I work and on Friday morning I decided it was time to give the GTI a bit of exercise.
The first bit of road is just fairly wide 30 and 40 mph zones that used to be part of an old major A road that's been bypassed and now being redeveloped, so that's a good place to get the engine warmed up gradually and allows you to vary the revs a bit and play with the responses low down in the rev range.
Next up is a series of roundabouts, all nice and new so good smooth surface and quite sharp bends on and off these roundabouts, then we have a slowish bit through a village and finally a stretch of Roman road to get the oil nice and hot. Turn around at the roundabout before the next town and do the trip in reverse. The sort of roads GTI's were designed for, but definitely no Nurburgring.
The first thing you can tell about the Clubsport when in the warm up stage is that the throttle mapping is quite aggressive. I've not read dozens of magazine road tests on the car but I wouldn't mind betting a lot of journos would have picked up on this.
The engine is unmistakably Golf R in sound and power delivery. Responses are a bit flat until you get over 2000rpm then it just increasingly seems to feel more potent. I don't know if it's the low mileage on my car or whether the dealer put in rubbish fuel but there's a definite lag when coming off the power then back on in the lower mid-range. I didn't remember my R being like that and that car had a bit more weight to lug around. More on the engine in a while.
I'd read in the early press releases that the Clubsport had some bespoke suspension parts and in the early road tests I'd seen there was mention of how fantastic handling the Clubsport is compared to the PP GTI. It turns out that was a bit smoke and mirrors by VW and that journalists tend to believe what they hear in the launch speeches, and they had obviously forgotten how highly rated the GTI PP was when it was released (and when there was no 4WD R to steal its thunder). They've also ignored the rave reviews of the 280 Cupra they'd probably written themselves a year or two before as well, but basically it's a hybrid of those cars that the Clubsport is and no bad thing for that. In fact it's almost a best of both worlds.
Going from the various online resources of part numbers and Jackie Treehorn's table of part numbers elsewhere on here and other forums we can see that the standard Clubsport possibly has unique springs (or possibly Cupra springs even?) but elsewhere underneath it's all pretty much standard PP GTI.
Now having driven my own Clubsport on the same roads as I used to run my GTI PP, my R and my GTD in I can offer up my own opinion. And it is just my opinion from seat of pants science rather than trawling through parts catalogues.
The Clubsport takes the bends really really well. Like the GTI PP if you suddenly change direction sharply then hit the power the dampers can be caught out a bit before the VAQ can rescue the day. So you do get a brief lurch from the suspension at times and a chirp of wheelspin but that all adds to the fun. On the R forum that feeling would be due to the GTI not having the vitally important 4WD showing that it's impossible to put lots of horsepower and torque down in mere front wheel drive. On a GTI forum it's a case of "you can feel what's going on down below" and "in touch with the road surface". Somewhere in the middle of that probably lies the truth.
The standard Clubsport doesn't blast out of the bends and off the roundabouts like a rocket in the mid-range as a DTUK equipped GTD does, it doesn't squat and thrust like an R does and it doesn't punch then go a bit flat like a GTI PP does when you hit the plateau of the power delivery. Again, somewhere in the middle of all that is the Clubsport. You can feel it's down on traction and torque compared to the R (I won't say grip as it will offend Bridgestone haters, and I've come to be familiar with the S001s having had them for a short time on the R, GTD and now ED40). The ED40 does feel like it's had a bit of development in the chassis and engine response area despite it being pretty much a parts bin car underneath the unique body and interior addenda. As Golfs go the Clubsport really does feel quite lively as standard. "Stabbed rat" would be the cliche I'd use for the engine responses (the pedalbox just adds to this and I'm not sure if that's amplifying the bit of lag I mentioned earlier), and "surprisingly lithe" would be how I'd describe the chassis despite the fact on paper it's the same as the GTI PP. Whether the higher powered engine makes the chassis feel more lively than a standard GTI PP I don't know but it definitely feels slightly different. I ran a DTUK box on a GTI and even that didn't feel as lively despite probably similar power outputs.
In real terms over the whole trip, which I can't claim as directly back to back as the GTI PP was chopped in for the R almost dead on two years ago now and the R ended up semi-retired and then sold in late December last year the four cars do feel quite different.
The JB1 equipped R would obviously have stolen the show and yet when I did the same trip in that car it never really broke into a sweat and that's partly what fuelled my wondering about a tuned GTD being just as good as the JB1 R on the actual roads I drive. To get the JB1 R to play you'd need to be doing serious speed.
The DTUK GTD was a great compromise, huge torque out of bends if you had it in the right gear and a lovely cruiser on the open roads, plus it did 40 mpg in town.
The GTI PP was always a massively underrated car and one I remain very fond of. Great on fuel and immensely flexible but a little flat in the higher reaches on the odd days where you're really putting it through its paces.
The Edition 40 on the same roads just seems a lot more playful for some reason. Looking at the parts underneath it's hard to quantify why but in true GTI form I'd say "the sum of the parts is less than the whole". Once the soundaktor was switched to ECO it even sounded good (the one area the Clubsport does have a unique part is the exhaust system), it rides pretty well and the alcantara seats are really grippy, plus the fluffy steering wheel I'm growing to like.
Oh and surprisingly the ED40 actually returned half decent fuel economy on that little run out too, 34mpg on the computer as I parked up; the GTI PP used to get around 35 or 36 on average on that road, the GTD would return low 40's (tight engine) and the R would sometimes hit 30 or even 31.
The steering feels much the same as the GTI PP but the gear change does feel slightly different (better) to the GTI PP and GTD but that could be my imagination.
The one area I was really disappointed in previously was the fact that there is no lower ambient lighting in the car. I'm still not overly happy with that as it's one of the really nice features of the performance Golfs and it' a bit tight of VW depriving non wingback cars of the feature despite going to the effort of fitting a better centre console with air-con ducting. But driving the car on very dark country roads needing 100% concentration the fact that there are no internal reflections in the windows to distract you, or mask hedgerows where foxes and badgers could emerge at any second it's actually quite useful to have just the dials lit up and nothing else (the radio setting was on the additional dials which is a fairly dark monochrome screen).
Yeah, as I said before, it makes me smile.
