Hot Tuner 2016 4th place: BWA Auto VW Golf R

The BWA Golf R is a quick and useful street car and, to me, is the essence of what Hot Tuner is all about.

Hot Tuner 2016 is brought to you by Valvoline SynPower

At a Wednesday night street meet at Sydney Dragway, the Golf has ripped through the quarter mile in 11.8sec at 188km/h and on the same surface but with different timing gear (the Driftbox timing equipment MOTOR uses is generally acknowledged to read around 0.3 second ‘slower’ than a dragstrip timer’s light beam triggering system) its best number was 12.09sec at more than 185km/h.

The other benchmark, heaving the 1500kg heft of the Golf R (yeah, all-wheel drive Golfs aren’t small-car light!) to 100 kays, is typically devoured in 4.2 seconds with Morley achieving one particularly sparkly run of 3.89s. Who would have ever thought VW’s replacement for the humble Beetle would have evolved to be a thing such as this?

I had D’Alberto’s words in mind as I strapped on my helmet, but you can imagine my disappointment when, after a few hours of better weather – and track drying-out time, in which we were able to run all the cars for our figures – it began drizzling almost the instant I opened the Golf’s door. Gawddamn… with wipers on, I stuck the shifter into D and wandered out onto the track…

As well as the KW suspension upgrade, there’s been a bit of other fiddling with the chassis too: a set of billet alloy upper rear control arms and a driveline brace between the trans and the subframe. Alignment specs – critical for a good handling car – are one degree of negative camber all round and seven degrees of positive castor up front, which helps with steering feel and keeps the front tyres’ footprint planted mid-corner for power-down and steering.

However, although I found the steering to feel synthetically sharp, I didn’t quite find the apexes with the precision I expected; but hey, it was only five laps on a damp track and my brain is programmed with a fair degree of self-preservation, especially when I’m sitting in someone else’s pride and joy. Speaking later, BWA’s Craig Whyms mentioned that was more to do with his choice of semi-slick tyres – straight off the street – than any chassis set-up.

And gunning for such aggressive tyres was always going to be a roll of the dice with the weather.

Oh, and while it’s fourth outright at Hot Tuner 2016 for speed, the BWA Golf R does win something: the livery we’d be most likely to put on our own car. And that’s saying something.

OVERALL RANKING: 4TH

DISCIPLINE RANKING

4th | Lap time: 1:04.8sec 6th | Lap V-Max: 154.39km/h 5th | Lap V-Max: 101.85km/h 7th | Lap V-Max: 50.52km/h