‘BE CAREFUL, THIS IS THE ACTUAL CAR we’ll be timing at the Nürburgring,’ says Volkswagen R engineer Jonas Thielebein as I open the door to a pre-production Mk8.5 Golf R in the paddock of Germany’s Lausitzring. It’ll be a little while before we see the final car, but it’s clear that the camouflage isn’t hiding any sort of radical redesign, and the signs are that it won’t be much different to drive than the Mk8 either. ‘It was a case of refining a few things,’ says Thielebein. ‘We were very happy with what we had before.’
It’s fair to say that evo’s assessment of the Mk8 R hasn’t been quite as positive as that. It’s a hot hatch wea good part of why the Type R wonevo’s 18-car hot hatch megatest in issue 318, while the Golf only just scraped into the top ten.
