The Golf GTi is 40 years old next year, and to celebrate, VW has produced a hopped-up, ‘ultimate’ GTi. Notice I said ‘GTi’ and not ‘Golf’, because the R brand still sits above the ClubSport. Though not that far above, as we’ll find out in a minute. So without resorting to some sort of spiffy line diagram, the Golf hierarchy of speed now looks something like: GTi (217bhp), GTi Performance Pack (227), GTi Clubsport (261bhp), R (295bhp). All sport four-cylinder turbo engines. Big difference? The GTi variants remain front-wheel drive, and the R is AWD.Yep. Nice stepping of performance. Until you realise that the CS gets an ‘overboost’ function that provides 287bhp for ten seconds at full throttle in gears from 3 upwards. The first two are pretty much traction-limited anyway. Which makes it not-very-much less powerful than the R. And it’s due to be a grand cheaper. And it looks really rather excellent.No, nothing too revolutionary on the styling front, with the usual changes to bumpers, side skirts and rear spoiler/bigger exhaust tips. But the CS looks nicely purposeful without having an ‘I AM A SPECIAL EDITION’ makeover. There’s a new front splitter and air-channelling ducts (called ‘air curtains’) that help move air around the front bumper, and a nice little proto-ducktail spoiler above the rear windscreen. Apparently these changes produce real downforce, but when pushed on numbers, VW replied with the very specific amount of ‘some’, leading us to believe that it’s more the absence of lift than anything you might use to nail the nose to the floor through Eau Rouge. Still, every little helps. To my eyes, both the five-door and the three-door look expensively modified rather than cheaply tweaked. This is good. You can also have ‘ClubSport’ graphics, and - like on certain Porsches - these should not work, but do. VW provided graphs to demonstrate that every change was completely functional, though I was left unsure as to whether or not the graphics actually made me a better driver. I’m assuming they did.Umm. On a track, yes, pretty much. The cars we tried were on the Portimao Circuit in Portugal, and fitted with optional Cup tyres (road-legal, but what VW refers to as ‘dry-biased’). Let loose and driven smoothly, the CS is more than capable of keeping the R in sight. The overboost function has a fairly wide window of operation - albeit only in gears three through six in Sport mode: ten seconds of peak power, then you have to wait for ten seconds to access the extra grunt again. But let’s face it, ten seconds is more than enough to haul you out of a corner or past another car, leading me to believe that the overboost nonsense is all just a bit of light marketing to stop the CS looking like an R-lite. VW says that it’s a function rather than a permanent state of tune to save wear and tear. Hmmm.Well, this kind of power output and front-wheel drive sticks this Golf right into a hotly contested arena: Focus ST, Megane Trophy, Civic Type R - not to mention other cars both above and below in terms of price and performance. And it’s definitely a more playful prospect than the GTi or GTi PP thanks to a decent dollop of extra power and torque. It’s keener lower down, and with the boosty top bit, pulls harder at the top of the rev range than we’re used to with a GTi. The adaptive chassis has been re-tuned, and in all honesty it’s a right old laugh to sling about – predictable, fun, and deceptively rapid. Plus it sounds a bit more muscular, and with the Cup 2 tyres, resists the inevitable understeer to a noticeable degree. I still struggled to feel ‘downforce’ in the faster corners mind, and Portimao gets pretty rapid in certain bits… But despite VW’s claims that this will be the fastest hatch on a circuit, the Clubsport remains fairly grown up. You can provoke the car into doing interesting things, but with various diffs and traction control systems accelerating or doping diagonal wheels to create optimal traction characteristics, it’s not exactly … playful. Effective, yes. Fast, undoubtedly. But not daft.No. I think that VW has this one judged pretty well. No normal human being buys a hot hatch based on the amount of lift-off oversteer you can create on a track. They buy them to do lot of jobs at once, and then, when the kids are dropped off, the shopping is stowed and you’re in the right mood, you can have a play down a backlane without gaily lobbing your daily driver into a field. It really is a GTi taken to a handy extreme. That said, we were on a track, in reasonably warm conditions on a semi-slick optional tyre: I dearly want to try this car on a bumpy, leaf-strewn UK backroad before we give a final verdict. The reason is that I suspect on a real road with tight corners and slippery bits, I think the R would still be quicker. The CS’s re-tuned XDS+ electronic front differential does a grand job of trying to meter the torque between the two driven front wheels, but ultimately, the Haldex AWD in the R gets the power down earlier and doesn’t feel significantly heavier.The Golf GTi ClubSport is a very complete hot hatch. The kind of fun that I like: easy to drive fast, deliberate in its reactions and unlikely to spit you off. And because it has the adjustable chassis control, you can still wind it back into Comfort mode and potter to the shops without significant compromise. It’ll be produced for a limited time – though not a limited edition in any significant sense – and I think it looks great. Until we can get both on a real road, we’d still take an R, but the ClubSport is a nice little addition to the GTi range we never knew we needed…