The long version

The Mk1 GTI crowd is old enough now to have handed cars down a generation, and a fair number of survivors are still driven by someone who either bought one new or grew up riding in one — provenance measured in family history, not paperwork. Concours money has arrived for the rare unmolested examples, but the base of the pyramid is still weekend-warrior owners doing their own timing-belt jobs and taking the small-bumper hatch to the diner on a Sunday. It invented the formula every hot hatch since gets graded against, and it is still living the life it was built for.