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2018 Honda Civic Type R vs Ford Focus RS Subaru WRX STI Type RA vs Volkswagen Golf R
Sport compact car revival: Four pocket rockets vie for the title of best hot hatch
Every generation has one. Volkswagen Golf GTI. Acura Integra GS-R. Mitsubishi Evo. If you smuggled automotive magazines in from Europe, perhaps it was the Renault 5 Turbo or Ford Escort Cosworth.
No matter who you are or where you grew up, odds are you remember your first hot hatch—a plebeian-skinned powerhouse designed around the democratization of performance and practicality. Some looked like ATMs on wheels; others had sloping lines approximating a coupe. But they all held the same secret: startling horsepower and tight handling underneath their econobox sheetmetal.
Me? I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Subaru WRX. I was about 12 years old. It was a snowy winter morning, made colder by the wind ripping off an angry Hudson River. My dad and I were lugging my hockey gear through the parking lot of Manhattan’s Sky Rink at some ungodly pre-dawn hour for practice. He pointed to some bug-eyed car parked alongside the pier.
“You see that?” he asked. “It’s a Subaru WRX. I read that it was faster than a 911.”
“That thing?”
I could hardly believe it, but I loved the idea that a relatively affordable, dorky-looking compact could smoke a sleek, expensive Porsche. A new PlayStation 2 and copy of Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec under the Christmas tree only cemented the love of cars like the Subaru WRX and its rival Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII—not just for me but for millennials and Gen Xers across the country. Then the 2008 recession took the wind out of the economy and killed the sport compact car—as well as the eponymous magazine.
Now that the economy is well and truly thriving, some automakers are once again offering a revival of choices of blisteringly quick sport compacts. Sure, Mitsubishi may have traded building Evos for SUVs, but my first-blush Subaru still stands—the track-ready 2018 Subaru WRX STI Type RA is arguably the baddest WRX ever to hit our shores. Others are back in the game, too. Continuing its hot hatch history (offered for the first time in America), the big-winged Honda Civic Type R generates an outrageous 306 hp from just 2.0 liters of turbocharged fury. Representing Detroit by way of its German operations and sporting the same rally-bred heritage as the Subaru: the Ford Focus RS. Rounding out the offerings is the autobahn-storming Volkswagen Golf R—a GTI with a seriously bad attitude.
One of these four is the best sport compact on the road today, and we set up a battery of tests focused purely on finding the best driver’s car of the bunch. Our playground? Southern California. We’ll use Malibu’s canyon roads, our Fontana test track, and the Streets of Willow Springs racetrack—with our on-staff race car driver Randy Pobst behind the wheel—as our proving grounds.
Money plays a big role in the purchase of any car, let alone a car aimed at a younger, currently debt-saddled generation. But although sport compact cars do have sensibility and functionality baked into their silhouettes and packaging, we wouldn’t be doing justice to these four cars by focusing on value, fuel economy, or interior features. This comparison is built around one word. The F-word. Fun.
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