Volkswagen Golf R Wagon 2015 Review

Long corners, for starters, favour the wagon. Fast corners, too, are its friend. Bumpier corners help it use its length and (relative) rear weight bias to help keep the body controlled.

Everybody who’s driven it has more than a slight lusting after the Golf R. Everybody. Even people from rival car companies have admitted, in private, that its combination of interior quality, hard-core punch and all-wheel drive bite is a tough one to topple.

But not everybody loves a hatchback. Most people do, in the Golf R market, admittedly. But not everybody.

The hot wagon thing is a market that Audi has been plugged into for many years with its RS 6 and RS 4 and now Mercedes-AMG has stepped in with the E 63 and C 63 as well as the Shooting Brake versions of the CLS and CLA. BMW plays here, too, but only with its toe in the water with the M5, because it has no current plans to make a wagon version of the current M3.

So what did you do if you didn’t quite have that sort of budget? Well, a Golf R wagon would be a good place to start, if only somebody would build one…

Fortunately, Volkswagen had already planned an all-wheel drive system to plug in to its Variant body (see: Golf Alltrack review) and it just needed a bit of tweaking to make the Golf R. This hasn’t been an expensive exercise for Volkswagen’s engineering team, with the engine already fitting, the gearbox already fitting, the all-wheel drive already fitting, the seats already fitting and all the suspension bits already fitting.

It just needed a bit of tuning.

So what you end up with is a perfectly capable small family truckster, with 605 litres of standard luggage space, five-seat capacity, a 0-100km/h sprint in just 5.1 seconds, a 7.0L/100km NEDC fuel economy figure and an engine note that should be illegal.

Where the Golf Alltrack added 20mm to the ride height of the standard Golf, the Golf R Variant deducts exactly the same amount to create a very aggressive stance, exaggerated by its 18-inch alloy wheel and tyre package.

In almost doubling the cargo capacity (up from 380 litres in the hatch to 650 litres), the Golf R Variant also gains another 320mm in total length and stacked on another 79kg – all of it sitting over the rear wheels. To counter that, Volkswagen added slightly stiffer rear springs and fiddled with the rear damper rates. And nothing else.

And none of it – absolutely none of it – seems to have detracted from the experience. The car is a hoot. An absolute hoot.

There’s something gleefully strange about a body shell designed for family work having four exhaust pipes sticking out of its tail.

There’s something eerily wicked about watching and feeling the same body bellowing through switchback sweepers on full four-wheel drifts, with either the back end or the front dominating, depending on the driver’s preference.

It’s that kind of machine.

Yes, it has an incredibly practical edge to it, and that’s what makes it sneakily keep-worthy for families. For those days when its 605 litres of luggage space aren’t enough, you can drop the rear seats (via two levers in the luggage area walls) to create a 1620-litre luggage area. Got big boxes? Its boot area is over a metre wide, over a metre long and almost a metre high. Dump those rear seats and it’s 1.8 metres long.

You can get two baby seats in the back seat, if that’s where you’re at in life, and it has a 60:40 split-fold in it.
It’s got everything up front that the Golf R hatch has, too. That means radar cruise control, dual-zone climate control, some wicked leather seats that have so much bolstering it’s more like a scaffold and then there is the blue “R” logo embroidered all over the shop. Rather than go through it all again, you can read about the cabin of the Golf R hatch here.

Like the Golf R hatch (and the Alltrack), it repurposes the skid-control systems for its own mischievous purposes, in this case to provide grip where it naturally wouldn’t and to keep driving forward beyond the point where physics would normally overcome the Mac strut front and multi-link rear suspensions and want the car to move sideways.

Its version of the Haldex V all-wheel drive system usually operates as a front-driver, but when the situation demands it, it can instantly send everything the engine makes to the front axle or the rear one, or any mix of the two.

It uses XDS+ torque vectoring to brake the inside wheels on faster corners to keep everything in line when it all wants to scrub wide and it even has a race mode to crank up the noise and get the best out of the (optional) adaptive dampers.

But, again, this is all stuff sourced directly from the hatch and is relatively well known. What’s not well known is that this is, by many measures that depend on your lifestyle and circumstances, the best of the breed.

It gets the same raucous performance in a straight line, dimmed only marginally by the extra weight. It’s ferocious when you want it to be and calm, smooth and deep when you are just chilling or stuck in traffic.

If there’s a hitch in the package, it’s that the dual-clutch transmission isn’t always as quick to change up a gear as you want it to be, which is odd, given that the paddle shifts are essentially on-off switches. You can get yourself into situations where you want it to shift up and, out of frustration you pull a paddle, only to find it finally on board with your thinking and changing up. Twice.

It can work the same way coming down the gears into a corner, too, waiting to shift down in Dynamic mode until you’re frantically grabbing at the downshift paddle.

A manual box would, of course, fix this, but nobody wants them, other than a noisy minority of forums visitors that statistically don’t buy the cars anyway.

There are overwhelmingly good points about the transmission, though. It’s fast when it does actually do its shifting, it has an engine cut-out that sparks and crackles and fires even more noise through the exhaust and it loses basically no time between shifts.

But the gearbox will always be overshadowed by that engine. A wonderful thing, it’s outrageously oversized in its character for the capacity of the four cylinders that make it.

It is so torquey that all of its 380Nm maximum is already there at 1800rpm and it’s all still there at 5500. Yes, there are 300 old-school ponies up there (221kW in Europe, which like the Golf R hatch will be detuned to 206kW for Australia's 'hot climate'), but it’s the torque that makes the car and it’s in the torque band that it lives most of the time.

You can rev it and rev it, but it’s at its best being left a gear too tall and hauling through corners in the fattest part of its torque delivery. That’s when the special happens.

Even with its adjusted weight distribution and dorkey tail end, the Golf R Variant lets – nay, demands – you throw it any corner that looks safely clear and interesting. Off camber, mid-corner bumps, surfaces changes… None of it puts the Golf R off its game.

You can live on understeer on fast or slow corners, if that’s your thing. You can fiddle with the weight transfer to get yourself some olde worlde lift-off oversteer. You can push some weight onto the back end during long corners or you can live in long, four-wheel drifts that are completely neutral.

A set of 225/40 R18s has rarely had to work this hard in a small wagon and rarely to such great effect. You can occasionally feel the addition firmness at the rear, but not so much when you’re pushing. More when you’re cruising, unladen, along a bumpy road.

Otherwise it’s just brilliant, all the time. Outrageously brilliant. And it does it all with a lightness of spirit and the projection of sheer joy that very few cars manage to deliver.