Hot hatch ideas

James Bond Junior

Life in sandland is all good, but the time has come to pick up a second car. Wife is choosing this time round and in true fashion as to why I married her, she wants a hot hatch. She had a Mini back in the day so a Cooper S is on the hitlist but I'm afraid of reliablity, especially in the sun.
The hit list:
Golf GTI mark 6/7
R32 mark 6
Cooper S
Hyundai Veloster (I'm not mad about these but they're chaappe.)

Cost to run isn't an issue as such, fuel is cheap, no tax and insurance is cheap too but reliablity is paramount, our Jeep had a few expensive bills so want something that won't be in the garage weekly.

JC01

Out of those the only hot one for me is the R32.
Would a 135i be an option? Not a fan of hatches myself but they have an incredible powerplant bet into them.

James Bond Junior

JC01 wrote: »

Out of those the only hot one for me is the R32.
Would a 135i be an option? Not a fan of hatches myself but they have an incredible powerplant bet into them.

135i is not the easiest thing to find and they're quite expensive. Scirocco R is also on the list.

Today I learned there is a mk6 r32.
I always thought the R replaced them.

James Bond Junior

BrownFinger wrote: »

Today I learned there is a mk6 r32.
I always thought the R replaced them.

Sorry, the mk6 is an R not an R32. You knew what I meant..

James Bond Junior

James Bond Junior wrote: »

Sorry, the mk6 is an R not an R32. You knew what I meant..

No,I thought I was mistaken.
Skip the mk6 gti if a 7 is in budget

James Bond Junior

BrownFinger wrote: »

No,I thought I was mistaken.
Skip the mk6 gti if a 7 is in budget

Sorry thought you were being smart. I enquired this morning about a mk7 but it was a scammer. Price was a little too good to be true.

ba_barabus

Renaultsport Clio or Megane an option?

James Bond Junior

ba_barabus wrote: »

Renaultsport Clio or Megane an option?

Not available locally. German, American and Asian brands.

Marcusm

James Bond Junior wrote: »

Not available locally. German, American and Asian brands.

Paceman Cooper S! Pref All4.

MarkN

Fiesta ST.

ofcork

I30 N?

James Bond Junior

I'm in the Middle East, some cars aren't available like a fiesta ST. Hyundai are everywhere but i30s aren't a readily available option.

bazz26

Any Audi S3/RS3 out there?

James Bond Junior

bazz26 wrote: »

Any Audi S3/RS3 out there?

Plenty but out of her self imposed budget sadly. I'd happily push it up to get one but she doesn't want to spend. We have about €7k to spend tops, an S3 comes in from around €14k.

The Analyst

James Bond Junior wrote: »

Life in sandland is all good, but the time has come to pick up a second car. Wife is choosing this time round and in true fashion as to why I married her, she wants a hot hatch. She had a Mini back in the day so a Cooper S is on the hitlist but I'm afraid of reliablity, especially in the sun.
The hit list:
Golf GTI mark 6/7
R32 mark 6
Cooper S
Hyundai Veloster (I'm not mad about these but they're chaappe.)

Cost to run isn't an issue as such, fuel is cheap, no tax and insurance is cheap too but reliablity is paramount, our Jeep had a few expensive bills so want something that won't be in the garage weekly.

Plenty of Focus STs around. Sadly 2020 focus models are not being sold in GCC. My wife has 2015 2.0 Sport, 170bhp. I love driving it. Feels like a go-cart on the big roads in the UAE!

circadian

R32 for me out of that selection. Any Japanese hot hatches available out there? Civic Type-R would be a good buy if its in budget.

bazz26

Mazda 3 MPS if available there?

Leonard Hofstadter

I'd get an R32 or a 135i, although the former is obviously only available in the Mk5 and the latter you say is hard to find. You might as well have the big engine in the land of cheap fuel. What about the first generation 1 series, they did a 130i in those?

James Bond Junior

Right, I've a 2009 R32 lined up to view but between late meetings this week and a 8pm curfew I'm not sure. The r32 is coming in around €4k or so which is well well under budget but it's local so we shall see how it pans out.

Edit: would I be daft to go DSG of that era?

MEGA BRO WOLF 5000

Golf R would be my no1 choice and a 135i after that.

James Bond Junior

Hunky Monster wrote: »

Golf R would be my no1 choice and a 135i after that.

There's two 135i for sale currently. One is manual, not interested as it's all highway and heavy traffic james. The other is a vert with some questionable mods.

Leonard Hofstadter

James Bond Junior wrote: »

There's two 135i for sale currently. One is manual, not interested as it's all highway and heavy traffic james. The other is a vert with some questionable mods.

Worth pointing out if you're looking at the first generation 135i (which I assume you are since you mention the Vert since for the second gen cars the Coupé and Vert became 2 series), you want to avoid cars built before March 2010, because the earliest cars have the N54 twin turbo engine, which has well documented turbo issues.

You want a car with the N55 single scroll turbo engine, it's much more reliable. Sure the older cars are capable of being mapped to higher levels of power, but I'd take reliability over tunability all day long.

All second generation 1/235i models use this engine.

selectamatic

James Bond Junior wrote: »

There's two 135i for sale currently. One is manual, not interested as it's all highway and heavy traffic james. The other is a vert with some questionable mods.

Automatic, heavy traffic and big straight roads aren't really suited to hot hatches.

Would ye not be better off with a big sporty/powerful coupe of some sort?

James Bond Junior

selectamatic wrote: »

Automatic, heavy traffic and big straight roads aren't really suited to hot hatches.

Would ye not be better off with a big sporty/powerful coupe of some sort?

You make sense in a lot of ways but something with power on tap is 100% needed. The standard of driving is awful and being able to put the foot down to get get out of trouble, change lanes, join a busy highway etc is important. I could buy a 1.25 fiesta in no time but the lack of power is actually dangerous when sharing the road with Arabs. We were rear ended by a car doing 160 and we were doing 120 and thankfully it was a large Jeep so nobody was hurt. It almost happened a few other times and the availability to move fast to get out of the way prevented an accident. The locals drive on their phones with kids standing between the front seats or on the drivers lap while tailgating etc.

selectamatic

Ya definitely something with power and presence would be where I'd be going too but I'd just not limit myself to a hatch.

E92 330i with the n52 engine? Reliable, powerful and still pretty sporty.

Lexus is350 with the brilliant 2gr engine? Again plenty of power and very good reliability.

Both would be back a bit in years but they'd generally be reliable and have good safety features.

Bigus

Some very interesting stuff on copart U.K. out of Dubai, if you could do a small bit of spannering !

James Bond Junior

Bigus wrote: »

Some very interesting stuff on copart U.K. out of Dubai, if you could do a small bit of spannering !

Don't have the time unfortunately. Haven't eve. had time to look at the R32 this week so far.

Heres Johnny

James Bond Junior wrote: »

Don't have the time unfortunately. Haven't eve. had time to look at the R32 this week so far.

I agree with you on the driving out there. Was there for a week a few years ago and I've never seen such bad driving. Absolutely atrocious.

I presume you've seen the wealthy lads hanging out of their massive Suvs passing their phone number to women at motorway speeds. That's going to happen here soon if pubs don't reopen!

And the Indian taxi drivers that are constantly yawning because they drive all day every day.

James Bond Junior

Heres Johnny wrote: »

I agree with you on the driving out there. Was there for a week a few years ago and I've never seen such bad driving. Absolutely atrocious.

I presume you've seen the wealthy lads hanging out of their massive Suvs passing their phone number to women at motorway speeds. That's going to happen here soon if pubs don't reopen!

And the Indian taxi drivers that are constantly yawning because they drive all day every day.

More like people glued to their phones, on instagram or facebook, recording voice notes on Whatsapp with 5 kids in the back climbing through the front seats. Whilst tailgating the car in front.

Then again I can't talk, I paid my speeding fines last week. I had three and herself had four accumulated in a short year. I kindly reminded her that she would be off the road at this stage in Ireland!! €23 per fine was a little painful.

James Bond Junior

An update. Another speeding fine since my last post, the wife again! Timestamp put me on the golf course so I'm innocent.

I'm off to look at an Alpina B3 biturbo in the morning. It's right on the budget but it's interesting and could be worth sticking in a container and shipping home when that time comes.