Fifth Gear returned to UK screens last week with the premiere episode of Series 15. This makes them the first major UK car show to get their hands on the Mk6 Golf. Here’s Jonny Smith’s review.
For more on the new Golf, check out this previous AUSmotive post, including the Trackback links at the bottom of the article that will take you to a wide range of Golf VI related articles.
Apologies for the lateness of this recap—Episode 8 was the last in Series 14 and the show starts with Vicki showing us the updated Honda Jazz. You can fit a push bike in the back, apparently. Vicki reckons the Jazz is not so bad. Shame it’s not available with an ESP system (in Australia at least). Tim Shaw finally changed his pants—thank the lord for that—shame he’s still a goat. He serviced his own car and saved a few hundred squids, good for him. Oops, spoke too soon, the clown and his pants make a return in the studio.
In keeping with let’s cram as much as we can in each show theme of this series, Tom was given about 11 seconds to speak about the four wheel steering system in the new Renault Laguna GT. There was a bit of banter about a new British sportscar, the Jetstream SC250, all fine and dandy, but c’mon producers give the show some air, why bother showing this car if all you’re going to give is what amounts to a 15 second advertisement.
The next segment saw Tiff and Plato take to the track … in go-karts (see above). Tiff annoying and whiney as ever was shown the way by Plato. Result!
This episode started with a proper old skool hot hatch, the iconic Volkswagen Mk2 Golf GTI. I’ve been fortunate to see a great example of these up close and they really are bloody good cars. Take a well loved Mk2 GTI to a tight mountain pass and it will keep any current hot hatch very honest indeed. Jonny was out to see what sort of improvements he could make at his local tuning shop. After Tiff set a benchmark time, Jonny started the mods. They started with the easy stuff like new suspension and exhaust, but also undertook a complete engine rebuild that was hoped to give a very tidy 50hp increase. The first part of the clip is shown above, check the second part to see how well the mods work at the end of this article.
Read on to see what else was in store for this episode…
Volkswagen Australia, are you watching! Even Tom Ford, all the way over in England, knows the deal—bring the Scirocco to Australia in place of the three door Golf GTI. While GTI production is in limbo prior to the launch of the MkVI model the case for the Scirocco is even stronger. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!
So we know how Episode 6 started, read on to see what else the Fifth Gear had in store.