The last performance Volkswagen I owned was the Corrado VR6. A car that I completely fell in love with being my first performance car and one that immediately took my fancy from reading Performance VW magazine all those years ago.

The VW scene is a fun one also, no egos, no talk of ‘so what do you do for a living’ like some of the Porsche events I’ve been to, just enthusiasts who throw great events like Stonor Park at Henley, ED38 and Wothersee. Attending these events and making sure your car stood out in an OEM+ kind of way was the usual camp for me. The amount of money and time spent really made me bond with it and it’s still the only car I’ve been really sad to sell.

Onto this MK5 GTI, it’s my new ‘daily’ and was acquired at a great price although I’ve had a few items to rectify – a few bits of trim have been removed to find rattles (mainly broken clips on the boot trim), 2 new tyres, cambelt, tensioner and water pump all replaced within the first week. It’s quite fun to have something I can tinker with again but it’s also quiet, comfortable, spacious and provides a great mix of fun and practicality. One of my favourite characteristics of the engine is that you can just leave it in 6th above 40mph and drive it like an auto on the commute, comfortably accelerating up to motorway speeds. As a few reviews have noted, the MK5 GTI is the ‘back to form’ car since the MK2. While I agree that it’s a great drive on the country roads and the motorway, I certainly feel a lot safer and this is far more refined than the MK1/MK2, which in comparison are go karts.

The main search items are cambelt replacements at 60k miles, coil packs replaced under warranty, manual gearbox to avoid DSG troubles and the 17″ wheels for our UK roads.

Performance is 7 seconds to 60 mph, 146 mph top speed, 200 bhp and around 36 mpg.

For sale is my old daily driver, which can be seen in the tab at the top of the page