Volkswagen Up GTI – the car world's greatest misses

Excitement. It bubbled through the crowd as Volkswagen whipped some adorably dinky covers from the Up GTI at its now defunct Wörthersee GTI Treffen in 2017. A show usually chockful of Golfs, this little critter arrived with a startlingly similar footprint to the original Mk1 GTI and the rather lofty promise to ‘carry on the doctrine of the lightweight, uncomplicated sports car in a compact format.’ 

It had been six years in the making. The standard Up had impressed us since launch as one of those sensible, affordable cars that transcends white-goods status with tight engineering, taut packaging and cute styling. Not the car we’d own long-term in isolation, but an absolute bullseye for teenage newbies or households needing a second car that runs on buttons. Unveiling the Up GTI on the Pyramid Stage of VW’s Glastonbury felt like cause to pull out the party poppers, then.

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The stock 999cc three-cylinder engine had gained a turbocharger for 113bhp and 147lb ft peaks to propel a 995kg kerb weight. New springs dropped the car by 15mm, while the familiar tropes of red highlighting and tartan trim helped ensure the visual makeover packed a typically modest GTI punch. 

Yet those changes that looked notable on its glossy plinth display presented much less of a tectonic shift in reality. An underdamped chassis took a chunk out of the inner-city insouciance displayed by the base car, and when driven rabidly – as cars like this typically demand – the asthmatic top end, baggy gearchange and overly zealous ESP all pointed to a car that preferred much less frenzied inputs. Perhaps that’s par for the GTI course, but this felt a lot closer to its base product than any of its badge-mates, undercooked Polo included.

Its tantalising £13,750 launch price, or a meagre £139 a month, felt low enough to cut it a notable degree of slack. Indeed, this is a car that reviewed well across the board at launch, not least within the pages of this magazine, proving what an ice-cold pint of water it felt amidst the arid affordable-performance-car desert. 

‘At this price there’s no other new car that delivers the same infectious appetite for fun,’ read our first big drive of the Up GTI, before an inevitably vain call for a harder-cored Clubsport version to perk everything up a bit more. It later placed seventh out of eight at eCoty 2018, ahead of a Mégane RS, no less – a fine showing for a 113bhp, £14k supermini. But while some judges hailed the VW as ‘innocent, brilliant fun’ or simply ‘marvellous’, others were less enamoured. ‘So close to a genius little package but it feels like VW bottled it at the last minute,’ lamented Jethro Bovingdon. I felt the same.

Perhaps the weight of expectation for a new miniature hero was simply too vast for such skinny shoulders to bear, a history of Minis giant-killing at Monte and giveaway Saxo VTR deals building a level of anticipation no hundred-odd-quid-a-month car could ever match. But the same decade had also given us the sparkling Mk2 Swift Sport and rambunctious Renault Sport Twingo, and compared with such cars the Up GTI fell short dynamically.

I take no pleasure in gently deflating the balloons at its party, if not outright popping them. Gift horses and their mouths, after all; as the hot hatch market continues to shrink in diversity while growing in battery-fed mass, we’ll all be desperately craving the refreshingly crisp thrill of a one-ton terrier. I just won’t be craving this one.

This story was first featured in evo issue 321.