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Golf's GTi - the ne plus ultra of hot hatches - is 30 years old. For anyone coming of age in the Seventies, the GTi was the performance car of choice: modern (folded-paper edges, aggressive styling, steel wheels, embossed mud flaps), affordable (well, relatively, in 1977 it cost £5,217 - that would today be £19,400) and, most importantly, superfast. Tales of its awesome acceleration were whispered in corridors by boys clutching rag-eared packs of Top Trumps. We bragged that the GTi was the first small car to boast 'performance-enhancing fuel-injection technology' - though we had no idea what that meant, something to do with drugs probably. For us, the very letters GTi came to denote the best possible version of anything, as in: 'Bacon baps are GTi' or more often, 'She's GTi.'
No one knows how the car, originally known as the 'Sport Golf', gained the suffix GTi. GT, or Grand Tourer, was commonplace at the time, but the 'I'? Injection? Perhaps, but there's no record of it. My brother to this day believes it stands for German Tank Incognito, which, considering the car's phenomenal build quality and durability, is as good as any of the alternatives. While we are on names, the Golf is not, in fact, a nod to every London cabbie's favourite sport, but is short for Golf-Strom, the German for Gulf Stream.
Almost every one of us has at one time or another driven or been driven in a Golf - after all, Volkswagen has made 26m of them since they started back in 1974. To celebrate three decades of the car that has become a byword for speed and reliability, VW's engineers knew they had to come up with something special. The result is this limited Edition 30. Only 1,500 are going to be released on to the paved front gardens of Britain. It is the fastest and most powerful production Golf ever made - boasting almost twice the power of the original MK1. At its heart is a tweaked version of the 2-litre T-FSI engine, which is fitted as standard in the GTi - so don't despair if you are not one of the lucky 1,500 new owners. Other than the extra power you will also have to do without body-coloured side skirts and a special chin spoiler - which is a bit of a Hapsburg, it's so low it bulldozed into the mud when I parked on a grass verge. The real joy of either car, however, is the automatic DSG gearbox. It's as smooth as the 18th green in Augusta. The change up is imperceptible, just the slightest quickening of the engine note before it settles once again to its reassuring hum.
Other than shared DNA and a warm spot in many driver's hearts, there's little to link the first and the last GTi. Driving an original MK1 today would be hard work (no anti-lock brakes, no electronic stability, no airbags, no stereo, no climate control), but the designers have maintained one small feature to bridge the decades: its golf-ball shaped gear knob.