Volkswagen Golf GTI TCR 2017 Review

If you love production-based racing but half a million euros for a GT3 is a bit too rich, the TCR championships might be for you. The Volkswagen Golf GTI was the car to have this year, so we hot-lapped the racer at Italy’s Vallelunga circuit to find out why. And to ask why cheap, high-quality TCR racing isn’t here yet.

It’s unusually cold at Vallelunga. Like, in the bottom half of the single-digit range. It’s not ideal for testing a front-drive racing car on slick tyres.

In fact, warns Volkswagen Motorsport’s resident legend Hans-Joachim Stuck, it’s like driving a racing car at the front and a shopping trolley at the back.

It’s so cold that the rear tyres slip from warm to freezing in the length of the front straight – and turn one at Vallelunga is a frighteningly quick sixth-into-fifth gear switchback affair.

There is no traction control here, no skid-control and no ABS to save you from the hockey pucks attached to the rear axle. There’s just aerodynamics and the Golf GTI TCR’s inherent grip, coupled with your own prudence.

You probably haven’t heard of TCR (Touring Car Racing). Yet. There are no solid plans to bring it to Australia, though it’s been spoken of frequently in high places. And it should be.

The TCR format has championships scattered throughout the world. More than 450 cars actively racing last year in 230 races worldwide in 23 championships, with the brands including Seat, Audi, Opel, Honda, Hyundai, Alfa Romeo, Kia, Peugeot, Ford and Subaru.

Like the GT3 racing formula that has stormed the world, the TCR championships are all based heavily on the road cars, with the Golf GTI racer using nearly 70 per cent production parts.

To even qualify, the model has to have sold 5000 cars over the previous 12 months, which rules out the exotica, just like Group A did.

Like the GT3 categories, the variations in the cars are evened out on BoP (Balance of Performance), where they are each rigorously tested pre-season to even their quirks out over the course of a lap.

Unlike the GT3 categories, TCR championships don’t allow factory teams. It’s purely a privateer affair and its competitors so far range from owner-drivers to (like GT3) racers who just turn up on the weekend after paying professional motorsport operations to take care of everything.

And they pay a whole lot less than a GT3 driver, whose chariots are usually around the half-million euro mark, give or take a bit.

A TCR Golf GTI ‘only’ costs €95,000 (less than $A150K) ready to go, and you can take it with either a cheaper seven-speed dual-clutch transmission or the lighter, faster shifting six-speed sequential unit.

All the cars are front-wheel drive, all of their turbocharged engines range from 1750 to 2000cc and they all weigh at least 1285kg.

And then they begin to go about their work in different ways. For Volkswagen, it means slipping the all-wheel drive Golf R’s engine into a front-driver, with the 2018 cars getting a jump in power from 243 to 257kW at 6200rpm.

There’s torque, too, with the 1984cc motor delivering 420Nm of it at just 2500rpm (which is odd for a racing car).

The rest is as it looks, with the 4378mm-long car dipped in aerodynamic icing to make it glued down in high-speed corners and a mechanical limited slip differential helping the gummy boots to punch out of the low-speed stuff.

Volkswagen has already built more than 50 TCR Golf GTIs, or rather its Catalan offshoot Seat has. There’s a mini-production line at Seat’s Martorell plant that churns out all the Volkswagen Group’s TCR racers, including its own Leon FR, the Golf GTI and the Audi A3.

They outfit them with a rock-solid steel cage, new front uprights, new springs, race brakes and uprated everything underneath.

Then they sell them off to privateers or professional race teams, who take care of them for the season and largely adjust things like the ride height, the track width, the camber angle and the three-stage anti-roll bar to suit the tracks or the driver preferences.

Regardless of which body style or brand it is, it takes the motorsport operation three weeks to build up a TCR racer, coming down the line in batches of five at a rate of up to 10 cars a week.

“The new look for the Golf GTI TCR resulted from close cooperation with Volkswagen Design. This helps us to underline just what a close relationship exists between the production model and the racing version,” Volkswagen Motorsport Director Sven Smeets insists.

“We are not allowed to make expensive developments. There is a region between €100,00 and €150,000 for a complete car ready to race, and the car’s engineering is frozen for three years (though we were allowed to make the facelift when the road car does).

“For example, the engine comes directly from series production and only requires minimal adjustment for competitive racing.”

The Golf is also a neat unit inside, outfitted with a proper set of pedals, a Big Red Button, a clip-on multi-function steering wheel and a fully digital dash.

And they are fun and loud and, in these conditions, very tricky to drive. There are faster racing cars out there, because the GTI only hits 100km/h in 5.2 seconds and reaches out to 258km/h, but that doesn’t matter much in a crowd of cars with similar straight-line pace.

Their sheer race-readiness and toughness has quickly become legend, with drivers bumping each other gleefully and a GTI TCR even romped home in its class at this year’s Nurburgring 24 Hour race.

The workmanship is professional and reeks of something well north of the GTI TCR’s purchase price and would put some premium cars to shame.

The stripped interior shows perfect seam welds everywhere (we checked all three cars Volkswagen had, just to be sure), a beautiful, high handbrake (for starts, mostly) and a meaty steering wheel.

The feel, when you’re clipped in to its five-point harness, is like what you’d imagine it to be: it feels like a Golf, but stripped out. There’s something familiar and unfamiliar about it, at the same time.

But it sure doesn’t sound like a Golf GTI when you fire it up. It doesn’t sound like the Golf R, either. It sounds like an animal all its own.

It’s deep and rich and very, very loud, but unlike typical full-on racing cars, there are still engine-mount bushes to isolate a big chunk of the vibrations from the seat and the wheel and the pedals.

But the noise is the dominant feature. At least, until you get moving.

Even on a frigid day, it doesn’t flit up and down the tachometer’s circumference. It just blips once and settles directly into a raucous, computer-controlled hum that sounds like you’ve woken up inside a beehive.

And that gets louder as you roll out of the pitlane, even if the shift into second gear is harder and more positive than you’d be used to from a DSG unit.

It’s taut as well, forgoing most of the niceties of ride comfort in favour of biting down on corners and it’s so cold that two laps following reigning German TCR champ Benjamin Leuchter around for a couple of sighting laps ruins all the good work of the tyre blankets.

Our GTI is shod with Michelin 10x18-inch racing slicks, which Leuchter admits take a long time to get heat into them. The German championship rides on Hankooks, which heat up quicker but take some management to keep them from getting too hot.

That isn’t a problem today. It’s not a problem in the quicker corners, and it’s not a problem at the front-end, because it plays host to six-piston callipers and you can spin up the tyres in the first three gears quite cheerfully.

The first of Vallelunga’s many hairpin shows just how tough it is, with the rear brakes pinching and half spinning the car, even with the brake balance adjusted by Leuchter himself before we climbed in.

But after a couple of laps, with a bit of temperature in the rears, there is a lot to appreciate about the quirky little racer.

Firstly, there’s the stability and security of the thing in high-speed bends. It’s at least a gear higher in most quick bends than you think it should be, with that huge front splitter and the scaffolding and plank arrangement at the back pinning it to the road.

Even the lumps and camber changes in its sweeping, fifth-gear Turn Two don’t bother it as it punches through at a full bellow, the adjustable suspension rocking firmly while the body remains admirably flat.

It’s actually in the low-speed stuff that it gets tricky. Like most front-drive racers, it’s critical to shelve usual race-bred techniques and brake in a straight line. And only in a straight line.

Try to trail brake into the apex and those Michelin icicles attached to the rear hubs will just slide wide. And wider and wider until the car’s either facing the wrong way or trying hard to.

And this is the frustrating part of the day. It’s not that the car’s super difficult to get to grips with, but that you just get some heat into the back-end around the circuit’s more interesting parts only to feel any temperature bleed away on any straight more than about 300 metres long.

It can be done, but it’s an incredibly disciplined exercise to brake in a dead-straight line, every time, then tippy-toe into the apex before allowing the tight differential to gather pace on the way out of the corner.

Most modern cars like a bit of slip angle turning into corners to get their best yaw and acceleration, but not this one; or at least, not this one on these tyres when it’s five degrees.

But the front-end remains a trusty friend, and fast. It can brake incredibly deeply down from high speed, with more than enough feedback to finely judge the braking down to the point of lock up.

It’s especially good at stopping from high speed, where the aero downforce helps enormously, allowing you to stand on the brake pedal almost as hard as you like.

It’s at its nicest at high speed, especially the heavily banked, double-apex right-hander that serves as Turns Four and Five.

Even in fast road cars, this is a sequence you enter in third gear, but the TCR Golf hauls down hard from sixth gear and well beyond 200km/h into fourth, and never feels like it will do anything but stick and stick.

There’s so much grip here that when you open the taps on the exit after the second apex, you find the engine is almost at its rev-limiter.

Unlike most racing cars, there is so much torque in the Golf GTI’s midrange that you quickly realise you can turn in to the right-hander in fifth gear without losing any speed or drivability, keeping plenty of revs to spare on the next straight.

That’s the trick, its drivers say. It has bags of torque and using it keeps the front tyres alive in longer races. That, and braking in a straight line and remaining calm to the apex before trying to muscle some drive out of it again.

Either way, it’s a barrel of monkeys to drive and the TCR cars look like proper racing cars that are fairly cheap, well built and easy to maintain.

And they’re all about as fast as each other, so it’s a chance for their drivers to shine. Or not, as in my case.

2018 Volkswagen Golf GTI TCR pricing and specifications:
Price: €95,000-€115,000 ($A148-$179K)
Engine: 2.0-litre turbo-petrol four-cylinder
Output: 240kW/420Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch (or six-speed sequential), front-wheel drive
Fuel: N/A
CO2: N/A
Safety rating: N/A