VW T-Roc R Performance SUV aims to be more than a fast Golf on stilts

VOLKSWAGEN T-ROC R

Massively popular compact SUV gets 300bhp, sports-focused suspension and a great deal more in a bid to become the Golf GTi of the 4x4 world

IT HARDLY SEEMS LIKE ANY TIME

(though it’s getting close to two decades) since VW introduced its fi rst SUV. ‘What does Volkswagen know about 4x4s?’, people thought. ’Shouldn’t they just stick to making Golf GTis?’

Then those same people drove the Touareg and the penny dropped. Volkswagen meant business.

Fast forward to today, and VW is slugging it out with Toyota for the honour of being the world’s biggest SUV maker. The Touareg has been joined by the Tiguan, T-Roc and T-Cross, as well as a new generation of electric vehicles, and associated brands Skoda, Seat, Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini have all joined the fun too.

And they’re still making the Golf GTi, too.

In fact, they’re also making the Golf R, which is like the GTi only more so. For years, it’s been the defi nitive super-hatch. You know, like a hot hatch, but so hot it sets your trousers on fi re.

Which brings us to the T-Roc R. It would be a bit much just to call this Golf R on stilts, but the two vehicles are closely enough related for the preceding fi ve paragraphs to be more than just a load of old guff.

The T-Roc R is powered by a 2.0-litre turbocharged petrol engine which puts out 300bhp and 295lbf. ft. Fitted as standard with all-wheel drive and a 7-speed DSG auto box, it promises a 0-62 time of 4.9 seconds

Volkswagen’s 2.0 TSI petrol engine is pushed to 300bhp and 295lbf.ft for the T-Roc R. Mated to a 7-speed DSG automatic gearbox as standard, it drives all four wheels and can be tuned from the driver’s seat via a mighty array of drive modes – including Race, courtesy of the optional DCC adjustable chassis set-up, and not one but two offroad settings

As tested, the T-Roc R won’t leave you an awful lot of change out of fi fty grand. Even so, it’s not overwhelmingly luxurious; equipment is good, and it’s every bit as well put together as you’d expect, but the seats are sporty rather than sumptuous. Quite obviously, Volkswagen has spent the money on making the R go fast rather than cossetting you with leather and so on. That’s as it should be in a performance variant, of course – though even then, you might be disappointed by the sheer amount of hard and scratchy plastic on the dashboard

Left: 235/40R19 tyres are mounted on lightweight 10-spoke alloys, showing off your big, bright brake discs and black-painted calipers. The tyres were made to be leant on in fast corners but they don’t get upset by mild off-road terrain – though they do drum up a lot of noise at moderate speeds over badly surfaced roads Above: This is what three grand’s worth of Akrapovic exhaust looks like. The quad tailpipes tempted a passer-by into asking us to give it a blip; he was left wondering where all the noise had gone

and a top speed of 155mph. It comes with its own sports-tuned suspension to help you get the best from all that power, too, and the drive mode palette includes a promising sounding Race setting.

That’s in addition to Off-Road and Off-Road Expert positions, so this is a vehicle that aims to be good at a lot of things. Just as an SUV should be, of course.

First up, is it good at being an SUV? Well, the T-Roc is a former class winner in our 4x4 of the Year awards, so that’ll be a yes. Its cabin is very well put together, with the sort of rock-solid build quality you expect from Volkswagen, though there’s enough hard plastic around to feel disappointing in a vehicle that costs £42,190 on the road.

Stowage space is adequate up front (the door pockets will do most of the work here) and headroom is outstanding, though you won’t be able to sit one tall adult behind another without at least one set of knees feeling the pinch. The boot is as good as you could ask for in a vehicle of this size, both with the rear seats up and down; they do lie some way off fl at when folded, but it gives you a good chunk of space without moving the game forward in any particular way.

Obviously, where the T-Roc R wants to move things forward is on the road. Forward, and at speed. Ours came with VW’s Dynamic Chassis Control system, meaning variable suspension settings, and an Akrapovic quad-exit titanium exhaust, which between them accounted for just over half of the £6500-ish worth of options on board, so it was defi nitely set up for serious fun.

And you can indeed have serious fun in it. You can also encounter serious frustration – we found ourselves travelling through the Peak District in it one Saturday morning, and being sat in a line of posthumous day-trippers while holding back a vehicle that desperately wants to be let off the leash never gets any less infuriating. Find yourself a B-road with no traffi c, though, and mad cackles are never far away.

The drive modes include one called Race, which is of course like a red rag to a bull. The steering and suspension fi rm up a little and the exhaust note hardens; it doesn’t grow horns the way some performance SUVs do when you press the fun button, but it does demand that you give it the beans to get the best from it. Simply trying to drive fast isn’t enough – it wants you to drive it fast.

Do so, and there’s a combination of grip, balance, poise and response to go with the sheer urge being channeled out through the seven-speed box. It feels wonderfully competent, in a way that’s both exciting and reassuring, though if you want a raw, seat-of-the-pants experience you might fi nd it a little anodyne. Obviously, comparing it

to something like a Toyota MR2 or Mazda MX5 will sound idiotic, but it sets out to appeal to the same sense of fun – without being anything like as engaging.

A more useful comparison might be with the Golf R or GTi. From our experience, it doesn’t get close to matching those wonderful things for sheer entertainment, either. A manual gearbox probably wouldn’t sell well enough to be worth the development costs, but we reckon it would add an edge which, to us, wasn’t quite there.

It could be said that hot hatches are great because you don’t actually need to be going all that fast for them to be fun. Once they get to the point where you have to be going very fast indeed before they start being fun, they risk losing their soul as road cars.

Which brings us to the high spot in the drive mode menu. It’s not called ’Sport’ – it’s called ‘Race.’ Perhaps the T-Roc R simply has too much about it to be an SUV for cross-country hooning. Perhaps we should be looking at is as a trackday motor instead.

Either way, we were jumping aboard in a car park when someone rolled their window down and, gesturing at those big old quad tailpipes, shouted over to us to give it a blip. When we did, the look of disappointment on the guy’s face was an absolute picture. We consoled him with some old bunny about how you really need to hear it under load – but the thing is, we agree. We were expecting to hear a lovely banshee howl as we threw it at the horizon, and some shotgun bangs and pops as we banged it down the box, but it all seemed to stay kind of strangled. Again, we came away feeling that perhaps we just didn’t ever drive it hard enough to unlock the real drama.

On the plus side, you don’t get the wrong kind of drama around town or on the motorway either. It rides smoothly and quietly at cruising speeds, and the suspension doesn’t go harsh on you over the sort of shattered, broken road surface that’s all too common in our magnificent nation. Considering it’s able to handle with such panache, it rides extraordinarily well.

It doesn’t match this with refinement, though. On rougher A and B-roads, the amount of noise coming through from the surface is startling both in how nasty it sounds and how intrusive it is. That was one of the only marks we found against it as an everyday SUV.

And yes, you can off-road it too. The 19” wheels on the T-Roc R clearly weren’t made for this, but its 4x4 system can be configured to deliver traction at low speeds on slippery and uneven surfaces – and when you consider that we were nursing it over a stony lane over the moors then, moments later, leaning on it round fast corners on the way home, you’ve got to hand it to Volkswagen for the breath and depth of engineering that goes into making such a thing possible.

For not a lot less than fifty grand, though, rather than merely handing it to them we wish we were feeling like rushing over and giving them a hug. The T-Roc R is great at everything it does, but it didn’t stir our souls the way we were expecting. Perhaps we should have taken it to a trackday, perhaps we were just unlucky with the traffic, but if we walked into a Volkswagen dealer with this much money to spend we’d come home with a Golf GTi, an Amarok and a feeling of smug satisfaction that we were all set to enjoy the very best of both worlds.