1990 Volkswagen Golf Rallye Road Test | Meeting your hero

Casually driving down the wide, winding road that crosses the north part of Wolfsburg, Germany, is like taking a three-minute lesson in Volkswagen history. The picturesque Wolfsburg castle whose image has appeared on millions of cars is visible through the trees on the right. Look left, and you can’t miss the gargantuan Volkswagen factory where many of the castle-branded cars have been manufactured. Autostadt‘s glass-walled car towers are visible, too; they stick out from the landscape like a pair of transparent silos with their guts full of cars.

Volkswagen’s main plant was churning out the last examples of the seventh-generation Golf — and tons of delicious currywurst — as I drove past. It’s building the first eighth-generation models as you read this. I was behind the wheel of a Golf, fittingly, but not one that calls Wolfsburg home. It was a Rallye model based on the second-generation Golf and built in limited numbers in Brussels, Belgium, so that the FIA would allow it to race in the Group A category of the 1990 World Rally Championship (WRC). That meant taking on big names like BMW and Lancia, the once-glorious Italian brand that became a deity in the world of rallying during the 1980s.

 

Straight out of the WRC cosmos

The second-generation Golf was no stranger to racing; a monstrous, twin-engined prototype with more than 650 horsepower on tap nearly won the 1987 edition of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb. WRC was more challenging, however, because Volkswagen couldn’t plant its flag in the series by installing a second engine over the rear axle and calling it a good job well done. The car had to comply with strict regulations, and, more dauntingly, it had to be marketable enough to convince at least 5,000 buyers who could choose from lots of other go-fast options made in Germany, Italy and Japan to put a deposit on it. Development work started in the late 1980s.

Volkswagen started with a two-door Golf shell and punched out box flares above each wheel. It then installed a model-specific grille, rectangular headlights, plus a full body kit that included side skirts and a hatch-mounted spoiler. The changes were rather subtle considering what the company had in store for the engine bay.

The hottest GTI money could buy at the time was the 16-valve version. Engineers settled for a cylinder head with eight valves, which defied accepted notions of hot-hatchology until they bolted a G-Lader supercharger in the engine bay and raised the 1.8-liter four-cylinder’s output to 160 horsepower and 165 pound-feet of torque. Syncro four-wheel drive and a five-speed manual transmission connected to a short gear selector via a series of cables, not with metal linkage parts, channeled the engine’s output to the four wheels. Finishing the transformation also required a lot of small tweaks, like reshaping the fuel tank, moving the front tow hook to make space for the bulky intercooler, and redesigning the exhaust manifold. It truly was a rally car toned down for road use.

Context is useful here: the eighth-generation GTI packs a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine turbocharged to 242 horsepower, and the 16-valve second-generation model galloped forward with 134 horses under its hood. 160 was on par with a Saab 900 Turbo; it was a big deal in 1990, especially in a Golf. The trade-off was that adding Syncro bumped its weight up to 2,635 pounds, a 200-pound increase compared to the GTI. I computed these statistics as I ventured deeper into the German countryside, Wolfsburg disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

 

Rallye in name and in spirit

Some cars feel special as soon as you turn the key, but the Golf Rallye is not one of them. It takes a while to discover its secrets. Its 1.8-liter comes to life with a low rumble, and it’s quick off the line, but it feels very much like a livelier Golf until the tachometer needle crests the 3,500-rpm mark and begins its descent towards the red line. The supercharger wails as torque builds up, peaking between 3,800 and 4,000 rpm, and the Golf takes off. The 4,000-rpm mark is the drivetrain’s on-off switch. There is no delay, no lag, no semblance of linearity, and really no warning. It just goes, and the boost stays on thick and heavy until the needle approaches the red line. It’s in these conditions, when Germany’s dense forests become a green blur, that I fully understood the Rallye.

It’s several hundred pounds lighter than a modern-day Golf GTI, yet it somehow feels a little bit heavier on a twisty road. Most of the extra mass comes from the Syncro system, which is positioned below the driver’s butt, while a seventh-generation GTI’s weight is more evenly distributed. I’ve logged many hours behind the wheel of a second-generation Golf, so I have a decent idea of what it likes and doesn’t like to do, yet I found myself having to relearn the way the chassis handles, behaves, and responds before I could waltz with the Rallye without stepping on its toes. When you get it, you get it, and it’s just as enjoyable to drive as an old GTI in a different way.

Volkswagen originally clocked an 8.3-second sprint from zero to 62 mph, which isn’t jaw-dropping by 2020 standards but was quick enough to earn the Rallye top marks from self-appointed members of the Ministry of Hot Hatches in 1990. As it builds speed, the supercharger and the four-cylinder sing a duet whose sharp notes are beyond the frontiers of the tune belted out by today’s crop of hot hatches. It’s like a punk cover of a Shostakovich composition, while Ford’s now-gone Focus RS has a Swedish death metal band under the hood.

There’s no comfort mode to appease your mother-in-law, and the firm suspension isn’t open to the idea of making friends with road imperfections. At least Germany’s pavement is reasonably smooth. Staying true to its name, the Rallye takes a corner with a smidge of understeer and very little body roll, so figuring out precisely how to toss it into a turn takes practice. It’s rewarding when you nail it, and the Syncro system gives the 15-inch alloys the kind of grip a regular GTI could only dream of at the time, while the heavy, direct steering does the rest.

Crawling behind a Fendt tractor without enough visibility to safely pass gives me the opportunity to take a better look at the interior. Most of the noteworthy modifications made to the Rallye were outside, or under the hood. From the Recaro-supplied driver’s seat, it feels and looks like a second-generation Golf; Volkswagen does a much better job at differentiating its more driver-friendly models in 2020. Almost everything is analog, but the small LCD screen in the bottom of the instrument cluster is a nod to modernity that lets the driver tick through the time, the fuel economy, and the oil temperature, among other menus. Chunky buttons thicker than a tenderloin steak control equipment like the fog lights and the heated seats. It’s all very austere, but it also feels exceptionally well built, especially considering many cars made in that era suffered from cotton candy-like flimsiness.

 

Wolfsburg’s underground icon

Even in Wolfsburg, where spotting all manners of past, present and future Golf models is a normal part of life, the Rallye turns heads. Julius Caesar cruising top-down in a Miata, his crown nonchalantly flapping in the wind, would have been more subtle. Some people stared in stupor, many waved, and others whipped out their phone for a photo — #mk2, right? An older man in a rough, work-worn Amarok stopped while I was taking photos to tell me (first in German, then in English) that the Rallye was his dream car when it was new.

He wasn’t alone; the Rallye was the zenith of the Golf range and near the pinnacle of the Volkswagen line-up. It cost 50,000 Deutsche marks, which according to my convoluted marks-to-euros-plus-inflation-to-dollars conversion represents $45,000 in 2020. Put another way, it cost approximately twice as much as a GTI.

Volkswagen built the 5,000 units it needed to compete, sold them (none made it to the United States, though some American executives lobbied for it), went racing, and … didn’t bring home the results it hoped for. The Rallye finished the 1990 WRC season in 10th place with 10 points. Lancia won first with 137 points, while Toyota took second by scoring 131 points. Privateers continued racing the Rallye during the early 1990s but the company didn’t return for the 1991 season (which Lancia again won with 137 points). This short, unsuccessful career partially explains why the Golf Rallye sank from sight, and spent most of the 1990s and the 2000s as an underground icon. To the untrained eye, it looked like a Hefeweizen-fueled late-night tuning project. It was cheap, too, and collectors who knew what they were standing in front of got sweet deals on clean, original examples. 

Its star finally began to rise in the 2010s, thanks in part to the hoards of enthusiasts that ransacked Google’s search results for information about forgotten homologation specials. The Rallye was hiding in plain sight all along. Clean, running and unmodified examples now cost nearly as much as the model did when it was new, and they’re more expensive than a modern-day Golf R, which directly traces its roots to the Rallye.

Volkswagen chose not to directly replace the Rallye, though a 210-horsepower evolution of its drivetrain powered the uber-rare Golf Limited. The fourth-generation-based, VR6-powered R32 picked up the ball the Rallye set rolling by offering a similarly spicy mix of all-wheel drive and an unusually powerful engine for a Golf, but it swapped forced induction for displacement. It received a much warmer reception from enthusiasts, and its spirit lives on in the Golf R, which will return to American showrooms in late 2021 as a 2022 model.

Related Video: