Volkswagen’s professional racing lineup may have shrunk last year, but its customer racing program is still going strong. Why are people lining up to spend $100,000-ish on a GTI? Autoblog Netherlands finds out.

Unfortunately, this review is in Dutch, so some reading will be required, but the translation more than does the trick. And, hey, you get your cultural moment for the day by watching this video and discovering that we share some curse words with the Dutch.

The video is worth watching, though, for a number of reasons. Even the set up is cool. With a race track in Barcelona to share with Benny Leuchter (who set the [sadly] former FWD production car Nurburgring lap record) and Hans-Joachim Stuck (former F1 driver and son of Auto Union driver Hans Stuck) and some assorted Golfs to drive around in, this was always going to be fun.

But the real reason that Autoblog was in Spain instead of Holland was to drive the Golf GTI TCR, a racecar built for Touring Car Racing. The TCR is based on the same MQB chassis as the regular Golf, albeit a strengthened and stiffened version thereof. And that philosophy holds throughout the car. But for a few mods, this really is a hopped up version of the road-going car.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the TCR feels the same as a regular Golf. According to the video, it’s much stiffer, the steering is much quicker, and the whole thing feels more stable through the corners, as you’d hope.

The result, though, is a very quick, very approachable race car that leads this reviewer to curse freely and all but ask about financing.