Fortunately the outside of the car is rather more tasteful than the loud interior and it's the wheels that you notice first - giant, 18in BBS polished alloy numbers, wrapped in some serious rubber for a Golf, 225/40 ZR18s to be exact, which is somewhat larger than the 175/70 13s fitted to the original Golf GTI back in 1977.

The front end gains a deeper front air- dam, complemented by wider sills, roof spoiler and a single, 90mm chrome exhaust. The overall effect is to give this Golf a much beefier look than the regular car. It's just a shame they couldn't stop themselves painting the brake callipers red front and rear. To prevent customers having their own bad taste day, VW will only let you have this car painted in red, silver or black, and the only interior colour scheme is charcoal cloth trim with red stitching across the seats and steering wheel.

To help give the Anniversary extra edge over the regular 1.8T GTI, Volkswagen has thoughtfully upped the specification of the 1.8-litre 20v turbo engine. So it now boasts 180bhp rather than 150bhp, and 173lb ft of torque, an increase of 18lb ft. The claimed performance figures reflect this, trimming over half a second off the 0-62mph time and raising the projected top speed by 4mph to 138mph.

Driving this Golf, it feels instantly quicker than the standard car. There's immediate grunt from the tweaked engine - all that torque is available from just 1950rpm - so it has that effortless performance that a turbo engine tends to offer. Add in the excellent standard-fit Recaro seats and the sheer grip from the oversized tyres and progress tends to be brisk. Shame it's not very enjoyable.
Quite what has gone wrong with the current GTI is difficult to pin down. I was hoping this model might improve on the nasty, soggy, po-go motion that seems to start up in the Golf chassis when you're pressing on. But it doesn't. Whilst the set-up is slightly stiffer than standard and 20mm lower into the bargain, there's always a feeling that the road wheels aren't as tightly controlled in terms of spring and damping as they could be. It's still too spongy for our tastes, and not at all what you'd expect from a model such as this.

The dubious chassis dynamics aren't helped either by light, lifeless steering, and a handling set-up that's biased towards understeer.

What's more, this car has quite possibly one of the worst gearchanges on offer today, if our example is anything to go by. With the car in fifth it was possible to waggle the golf-ball-topped gear lever several inches side to side, enough to fool you into thinking it was actually in neutral. Progress around the rest of the gate wasn't much better - notchy enough to give you calluses if you persisted in trying to rush it.

The whole car feels like a missed opportunity to right some of the wrongs of the Golf GTI's recent past. And yet there's no arguing with the continued success of the Golf - it's just that people don't seem to be buying it for the same reasons they did 25 years ago. Back then we were still rattling around in British sports cars that were hopelessly out-classed by this daddy of hot-hatches.

To prove the point of how the world has changed, 40 per cent of Golf sales are now diesel and there's even a diesel version of this Anniversary that looks identical to its petrol brother, with the 150bhp/236 lb ft engine (expect both versions to hit UK showrooms around July).

The fact that there's a diesel version of the Anniversary shows just how much the world has changed since the GTI was conceived in 1976. And just maybe this is the next revolution in sports cars. If that's true, it will be the Golf GTI that was there first, yet again.