vw golf

Touring car racing is big business overseas. Think of it as European stock cars and you've got an idea of the fan base. And while there's a World Touring Car Championship, it's the individual national series that draw the most attention: series like DTM in Germany, Australia's V8 Supercars, Italy's Superstars series, and this, the British Touring Car Championship.

Outside of North America, the Golf has been Volkswagen's bread-and-butter model for more than three decades, making the diminutive hatch one of the best selling global vehicles since its mid-Seventies launch as the Beetle's successor. But in the States, it's a totally different story. Except for a few brief periods when fuel prices spiked, the Golf/Rabbit has always played second fiddle to the Jetta - little more than a Golf with a trunk.

Singapore has been singled out to receive a hotted up version of their Mark V Volkswagen GTI dubbed GTI V50. This gift to the island nation gets upgrades from APR including a Stage 1 ECU tune that adds 36 more horsepower and an additional 74 lb-ft of torque. Also underneath are a VW R32 brakes and calipers and a VW Performance exhaust. Together they'll turn your 0-to-60 run into a 5.6-second affair, which takes more than a second off the standard GTI.

Think the roads are bad in your neck of the woods? Growing up just a bit south of Detroit before moving to the sunnier climes of Arizona, this particular blogger has always assumed that Michigan's harsh winters and heavy traffic conspire to make the frost heaved and potholed highways of the Motor City the worst in the world. Apparently, that's not the case, and it's not even close.

Spy shooters have managed to snap a few pictures of Volkswagen's upcoming Golf R20 lapping the Nürburgring in Germany, in this case disguised as a mild-mannered 2.0 TDI.

Anyone itching to bring home a brand new Volkswagen Rabbit had better act fast. As expected, VeeDub has just confirmed that 2009 will be the last year that the American version of the automaker's popular hatchback will be called the Rabbit. The renamed 2010 Golf will be shown at next month's New York Auto Show in production form with an expected sale date here in the States sometime this fall.

Back in 2006, Volkswagen of America's public relations department had what they thought was a brilliant idea to rename the fifth-generation Golf as the Rabbit... again. Back when VW's first front-wheel-drive hatchback replaced the iconic Beetle in the United States, it was introduced as the Rabbit, despite the fact that the rest of the world knew it as the Golf. VeeDub apparently thought that we megalomaniacal Americans preferred our own personalized nameplate over what the rest of the world got. Not anymore.

The current Volkswagen Golf (a.k.a. "Rabbit"), which is a 2010 model, hasn't made it through the front nine, and already the next Golf is being teed up behind it. The new model is planned for 2012, two years earlier than planned, perhaps because VW wants to recast what the Golf represents with a return to frugal-yet-sporty motoring.

So it's not just America that gets up in arms over commercials. Remember the Matrix-styled ad with the Volkswagen Golf designer fighting various versions of himself? It seems a number of British telly viewers think the commercial "is in breach of the broadcast advertising code for featuring excessive violence that could be copied by children." So they complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, and the ASA is now investigating.

Click above for a hi-res gallery of the 2009 Volkswagen Golf GTI

Volkswagen customers in the United States have been patiently awaiting the arrival of the new sixth-generation Rabbit and its GTI performance variant. And while it's still a little ways off, at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel as the German automaker has announced that the new model will hit the U.S. market in early September 2009. European customers, meanwhile, already began taking delivery of their new Golfs last month, with the GTI due to arrive there next summer.