When I spent some time in England and Germany, my friends there laughed when I stopped to gawk at a 5 door A2 GTi. My German friend kept telling me “it’s nothing special, it’s just the golf 4 door with GTi badges”. He was both right and wrong, because while the 5 door GTi shown here really is just mostly an appearance package it was a car that the U.S. never received and one that I really wanted. I’m not even completely sure why Volkswagen chose not to bring the more versatile 5 door to the U.S. until the Mk.5 platform, but like many of the European variants they have remained out of our reach since new. 1989 saw the beginning of the changeover from the smaller bumper A2 to the chunkier “big bumper” look with integrated fog lights. Today’s example looks nearly identical to the 2.0 16V GTi we received on these shores – with the exception of the number of openings!
