9:45 am, June 29, 2015
I’VE COME to the sad conclusion the hot hatch as we once knew it is well and truly dead.
It’s buried. Gone. Consigned to the past like Grange Hill, Ed Miliband (hopefully) and Nokia mobile phones. Now I need to declare a bit of an interest here. I’m a child of the 90s. Well, a teenager of the 90s, a child of the 80s, but I won’t let facts get in the way of making me look a little bit younger.
That means my car-wanting days were filled with the sights of baseball-hatted, McDonald’s-eating, Ebeneezer Goode-listening youths flying past the end of my road at runway take-off speeds in various states of hot hatch.
Far from being appalled – which I’m pretty sure my dad was, but then he was appalled at most things, most of the time – I was rather impressed. I had a wanton desire to join their band of shell-suit clad comrades, to fit large exhaust pipes to enhance the mating call of the car further and laden down its parcel shelf, not with parcels, but with speakers so heavy they needed two fully-formed adults (of which I wasn’t one) to lift them in.
And the cars I coveted most were hot hatches. I always had a soft spot for Fords. Probably thanks to my dad’s default car purchases always featuring a blue oval badge. Granted, these weren’t quite as sprightly as the Fords I had my eyes on (Cortina, Sierra Sapphire, gold Granada) but they did enough to spark my interest in Dagenham’s finest other models.
It was the Escort Cosworth I wanted the most. All whale tail, flared arches and angry vents, it was my bedroom wall pin-up far before Pamela Anderson got any wall real estate (to be fair, she did get quite a lot).
But I digress. I’ll always remember being down the pub with the rest of school at the age of 17 – InBetweeners last-day-of-term-drink style – when in pulled one of our contemporaries in an L-reg, white Escort Cossie. He was 17 too and rumour had it his dad was paying more for his insurance than the car itself.
Wonderful reminders
Despite the fact he was probably bankrupting his old man, he was quite possibly the coolest person any of us (sort of) knew. That day he rolled into the car park, in that car, will forever be imprinted on my mind – and many of my friends’, too. Fortunately (for my dad) my hot-hatch desires were slightly less ambitious. At the upper end of the scale was an Escort RS Turbo (Series 1 or 2) to the just-about-attainable Fiesta XR2 (which I eventually bought).
In between were many others. My older brother had three Renault 5 GT Turbos. One blew up, one was smoked in so much the council took it away (at least I think that’s what happened) and the third had an Ali G body kit on it so ghastly that I can only assume Renault took legal action and forced my brother to destroy it. It was that, or he crashed it and didn’t tell me…
Then there were the GTIs. Even back then the Golf GTI MK1 was cooler than cool. However, I was reading Max Power and Fast Car and they were all about big bumper, slammed to the floor, smooth MKII GTIs. And then there was the 205 GTI.
I don’t remember any of my friends having one, but we all desperately wanted to. The 1.9 was the hero, the 1.6 the one within reach. We didn’t care that they were French, back then all that mattered were those badges of distinction sitting proudly on the C pillars.
Earlier this month the Car Dealer team and I spent a week in Wales reminiscing about these hot hatches of old. We were there to shoot a series of features which you’ll be enjoying over the rest of the year. The idea was to pitch old versus new so the line-up included my own 205 GTI 1.9 against the new 208 GTI 30th edition and a MK1 Golf GTI against the latest model. We were also lucky enough to have a Renault 5 GT Turbo, the first ever Clio Williams, a Clio V6 and the original Ford Focus RS.
All were wonderful reminders of days gone by – some when mobile communications involved a pager and you had to get up to change the channel on TV. Remember that? Anyway, what really struck me was the fact that in an industry that develops and improves its products at such a scary rate, the latest models may have been quicker, they may have been faster and they sure as hell were a damn sight safer, but they simply weren’t as charming as their forefathers.
I love old hot hatches for their faults, their torque steer, their flighty handling and heavy steering. I love their peaky engines and terrible heating, their wind-up windows and AM-only radios. They feel alive, special, intoxicating, and the new versions simply don’t. They’re good – boy, they are good – but they’ve lost their personality, their charm and their ability to make teenagers want them more than a blonde in a red bikini. And that makes me rather sad indeed.
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