This past weekend we headed to Zwartkops Raceway in Pretoria, South Africa, to check out the newly unveiled hillclimb GTI built by Volkswagen Motorsport, built to celebrate 75 years of Volkswagen in South Africa as well as the GTI’s 50th anniversary. The race weekend was split into classic cars on the Saturday and the modern and purpose-built stuff was set to race on Sunday. We headed through to the track on Saturday, taking advantage of the quiet time in the Volkswagen Motorsport garage so we could have access to the car without the hustle and bustle of the crew making sure the car does what it’s intended to on race day.
We’ve seen more than our fair share of racecars over the years, and this GTI has to be among the best of the lot. The GTI has the best of the best everything, and being a factory-backed project, it’s a racecar that manages to look like it should be on a showroom floor – if there was ever a showroom selling cars of this calibre. We had a quick chat with Michael Allers, the man responsible for the build, and posed the most important question we could think of, seeing as we already knew all of the tech details, which in retrospect wasn’t that important, but an answer was needed anyway. The initial press release that went out detailing the car specs called it a GTI, but after the news hit our socials, some people argued that it must be a Golf R because of its all-wheel drive setup. So, is this a Golf GTI or a Golf R? “Technically, we can’t call the car a Golf R because it has a 5-cylinder powerplant,” said Allers. So there you have it: this is a GTI hillclimb car.
We returned on the Sunday to see the car’s track debut, and it did not disappoint. The turbocharged 2.5-litre 5-pot DAZA is capable of delivering 1000hp (about 735 kW), but the car wasn’t using everything available as the debut was more of a shakedown to make sure everything does what it should in the setup. Driver Jonathan Mogotsi was immediately on pace in practice and qualifying, with the team doing the necessary tweaks and changes in between runs. Sadly, they never had the opportunity to test it with all the horses as they ran into a few gremlins. This wasn’t too much of a surprise as the car still had less than 50km on the odometer since completion.
“This was an exciting week as we unveiled and ran our new Volkswagen Motorsport Hillclimb Golf GTI for the first time at Zwartkops’ Top of the Hill Challenge,” said Mike Rowe, Volkswagen Head of Motorsport. “The car showed huge potential and immediately jumped into the top three in practice and qualifying runs. Sadly, however, some new car niggles prevented Jonathan from racing the final. Fortunately, Matthew Merton and Rory Atkinson still gave us reason to celebrate with a standard class 1-2 finish in their Golf 8.5 GTIs. To be honest, it was hugely disappointing not to be able to compete in the finals, as who knows what we still had up our sleeves with our new baby,” Rowe smiled. “So, we look forward to finding that out soon! Well done to Jonathan on his fine progress until then and to Matt and Rory on another great class win.”
Matthew Merton scooped up the silverware as he defeated teammate Rory Atkinson, both driving identical stock Mk8.5 GTIs, giving Volkswagen a 1-2 win in Class A1, and sixth and seventh among a field of road-going supercars.
When Volkswagen Group Africa Chairperson and Managing Director, Martina Biene, announced that this new GTI wouldn’t just be another exhibition run car at the next Simola Hillclimb and that the intention was to win the event outright, she was bang on the money. With the niggles sorted out and more seat time, the combination of Mogotsi and the car most certainly has what it takes to clinch that number one spot on the Simola podium. We’re not sure when the Hillclimb GTI will hit the track again, but you can be sure we’ll be there to see how it performs.
