Five more stupidly fast VW Golfs

VW's 2013 Worthersee show star was a proper monster. It featured a twin-turbocharged, 3.0-litre VR6 TSI engine, four-wheel-drive and a radical, plastic body.

Power was good for 503bhp and 413lb ft of torque, which meant 0-62mph in 3.9 seconds and a top speed of 186mph. Huge exhausts - which partially melted the plastic rear bumper on TG's brief test drive - and monster carbon ceramic brakes only bulked up what was already an astonishing package.

Oh, about that brief test drive... it was really, bloody quick.

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Originally built for Gran Turismo as part of the excellent Vision GT series of cars, this was Volkswagen officially off the chain. The roofless roadster got the same twin-turbo V6 TSI from the Touareg, here pumped to deliver 500bhp and 413lb ft of torque.

It was married to VW's ‘4MOTION' all-wheel-drive setup and a seven-speed DSG gearbox, which only had to propel a lithe 1420kg kerbweight. And it was fast - faster than a Ferrari FF to 62mph, anyway, recording a time of 3.6 seconds, a tenth quicker than the Fezza.

Top speed? 192mph, a particulary scary figure considering there's no roof...

Read the full story on the 192mph GTI Roadster

A 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine with a whisker under 200bhp per litre? Yes please. That's more horsepower-per-litre than a Veyron (125bhp per litre).

The 395bhp R400 was merely a testbed for VW, to see the stretchability of that four-pot. And by the sounds of it, it's very stretchy. 0-62mph in 3.9 seconds-stretchy, in fact.

There's the usual gamut of four-wheel-drive and DSG on board, too, as well as some visual trickery, but the more important thing is the R400 looks set to enter production, likely in early 2016. This is definitely Good News.

Your move, Mercedes A45 AMG and Audi RS3...

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Oh yes, no list would be complete without the daddy of all strait-jacketed Golfs, the W12 version.

As per the name, it gets the twin-turbo W12 engine so beloved of the VW Group, producing a scarcely believable 650bhp and an even more unbelievable 553lb ft of torque.

The engine itself was mounted in the middle, on a unique aluminium structure and under a heavily modified bodyshell (the vents were there to cool the big lump).

0-62mph? 3.7s. Top speed? 184mph. Sure, it's not the fastest mad Golf from the mad Golfs we've shown you, but purely because of that engine, it's clearly the maddest mad Golf. If that sentence made any sense at all.

OK, so this isn't a Volkswagen Group production, but we had to include it because it certainly qualifies under the ‘entirely unhinged' category of VW Golfs. It wasn't built to show off potential design themes on future Golfs, nor did it showcase a new engine, or indeed any new technology.

No, this is a first-generation Volkswagen Golf built by a privateer, with a 1.8-litre 16-valve four-pot engine, a socking great turbo running up to 60 PSI, four-wheel-drive and a DSG gearbox.

The result is over 1000bhp, 0-62mph in 2.0s, 0-124mph in 4.89s and 62-124mph in 2.89s.

Why? Does it matter? It's a thousand-horsepower MkI Golf, for goodness' sake...

Watch the video here