The Golf is the symbol of the well-rounded European family car, or at least it used to be before crossovers took over a few years ago. It usually comes with pretty small engines, designed for efficiency, so it's the last car you'd expect to deliver supercar level of performance.
We're not saying it's slow, as almost all the models are able to hit 124 mph (200 kph), except for the ones with 3-cylinder engines. But the Golf is the last car you'd expect to deliver supercar levels of speed.
So what if we told you there's one Golf 7 in Germany that was just clocked at 220 miles per hour? That's 354 kph in European money, and it's the kind of figure that puts even some supercars to shame.
Right around 200 mph is where even some of the juicy Italians start running out of puff. 221 mph happens to be the top speed of the Ferrari Enzo, while the hybrid LaFerrari is advertised at 217 mph, though it has gone faster, clocking 230 mph just last month.
To push a Golf that hard, a specialist German tuning company has created a real monster. We're talking about the HGP Golf 7 R that swaps out the familiar 2.0-liter turbo four-banger and in its places puts a 3.6-liter VR6 with two turbochargers. Using a number of custom internals and induction magic, this six-cylinder unit is capable of pumping out 780 horsepower, more than a Lamborghini Aventador.
As far as we know, the Golf also has a number of other drivetrain changes. The gearbox is most likely a modified version of the one fitted to the Audi RS3, complete with the compact quattro AWD system for transverse engines.
The old saying says that to kill the monster, you must become a monster yourself. Thus, we're not surprised to hear that HGP's supercar killer costs about €100,000.
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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