When I was getting into the “Volkswagen Scene”, it was a game of brinkmanship. And by Volkswagen scene I mean my smallish group of friends who owned Volkswagens and all congregated at the local European fixing spot, and by brinkmanship I mean whatever we could afford at the time for modifications. I outfitted my “GolfTi” with a GLi interior and GLi-spec BBS RAs, my friend with his GTi got a Techtonics Exhaust and coilover suspension. One traded a Jetta Carat for a 8V 91 GTi in Tornado Red. Another (after more or less wrecking the mint 2.0 16V GLi he was given!) bought a G60 supercharged swap first generation Scirocco. That move gave this particular individual the trump card in the group, even if that G60 never ran right. The point is, we were all small potatoes, and that was made pretty clear to me when I ran into someone with an actual budget.
That person had a then brand new 1996 GTi VR6. An A2 chassis fan, I derided the A3 as fat and too luxurious. But how quick the VR6 could be was made pretty evident to me one day as I hounded the rear bumper of his GTi down a country road. Finally, he succumbed to my goading and lay hard into third gear. At the end of a quarter mile straight, it was enough to pull probably 10 car lengths on my clapped out Golf, but it might as well have been a mile – I was utterly defeated and my opinion of the VR6 changed in 15 seconds time. Since then, A3 GTi VR6s have always held a certain fascination for me and my time owning a ’98 Golf K2 left me tempted to consider a late VR6 as a daily driver. But what if you had one and your group of friends also tried the same game of brinkmanship, but had better resources?
