551HP. 1,200kg. 3 doors, 7 speeds, and All Wheel Drive. Volkswagen's second entry into the realm of Vision Gran Turismo cars might have been the very first to attempt to have some semblance of relevance for the people, both for outsiders looking for casual eye candy, and for those actually playing the game; the Volkswagen GTI Supersport Vision Gran Turismo is essentially a Golf that got way too hot about the game, and therefore sports a serious boy racer body kit, while having specs that would seemingly make it an easy fit into both Gr. 3 and Gr. B competition with minimal modification, chief among which has to be the addition of a fuel inlet. I mean, come on, seriously?
Yet, somehow, unlike its stable mates, the Beetle, Scirocco, and even the GTI Roadster VGT, the Supersport is the only one that doesn't represent the brand in any sanctioned category of racing. Of course, as Vic has helpfully pointed out already, the SS was supposed to have a modified Gr. B variant, but was cut for unknown reasons. My last minute, low effort livery on race day is supposed to take after said Gr. B version of the SS. It literally is just three more Volkswagen scripts, a VW logo on the roof, two tow arrows, and some drill holes on the bonnet where the fog lights would install. Hey, at least give me points for initiative with the holes, okay?
See, Square, this is what happens when you procrastinate and rewrite things too much with your stupid perfectionism now someone else dropped that bombshell and now you look like a limp dick ripoff chump what is finishing after him most races not bad enough for you and now you gotta finish behind him in writing too?
As a VGT car, there are several annoyances I struggle to look past that are common among VGTs, such as its million credit asking price, how utterly useless it is in this game, and a par for course black hole of an interior. If you can afford to sustain the niche hobby of launching your credits into black holes however, there's actually quite a lot to like about the SS; it stops well, slices into corners well, and certainly goes like stink, especially off the line. Its AWD, light weight, and racing slick tyres are all indispensable ingredients in facilitating a strong launch, and yet the SS still manages to wheelspin off the line in first in spite of all that! In our lobbies, we always use grid starts, and that's when the SS felt like a cardiac arrest simulator, as there's always the threat of the persistent grid start bug. It really is a car that can bring you from 0–60–dead in just under two seconds if you aren't paying attention.
More than any of that however, the thing I love most about the SS is Lapiz Blue. I think it's the second most beautiful paintjob in the world, but I'm only saying that because I'm faithful to a fault. It has such a mesmerising, deep contrast, complemented by tiny sparkles under its confidently gleaming clear coat, I just want to melt into it and become one with it. About half the field during race day had Lapiz Blue SSes as their base car, though the only one I have, a prize from the daily wheel, is in Reflex Silver, which made up about the other half of the field. If Gran Turismo 7 lets us obtain paint chips just from buying the car it comes with like in GT5, I would pump millions upon millions of credits into a probably very puzzled Volkswagen dealership just for Lapiz Blue paint chips alone.
As things currently stand however, there's a less than zero chance that I'll spend my own hard–earned credits for the SS, and that's because I can't seem to wrap my head around how the thing drives.
The specs of the car and its default Racing Hard tyres allow it to reach GT3 levels of straight line speed, but it certainly doesn't have GT3 levels of cornering speeds due to it understandably having some power understeer on exits. As such, despite the car being able to go, stop, and slice into apexes like a GT3 car, it requires drivers to set it up for a corner in a fashion much more akin to an FF cup car instead of a RWD GT3; slow down amply for a corner, and then get the car rotated just that bit more before nailing the apex to set the car up for its predictable power understeer on exits, which will take some uncomfortable undoing of learned habits if you've been frequenting GT3 and Gr. 3 machinery that is this game's focus for four years. It's such a shame because this could be a completely negligible issue had the car just come with an adjustable centre differential like the Gr. B race cars. While the car cannot fit dirt tyres, the few excursions off the beaten path I've had with the car suggests to me that the torque split is set up for dirt driving, and I'm not entirely sure if the prior knowledge that a Gr. B version of this car is supposed to exist has predisposed me towards that conclusion.
Thankfully, the car does stop a little better than a typical Gr. 3 car, being lighter than most with BoP applied and with the extra drag of its hatchback body style helping bring it to a halt quickly. However, this is also where a big part of the confusion lies for me: the slightly lower cornering speeds and the slightly quicker deceleration in comparison to a Gr. 3 car creates a weird mental dichotomy for me as I have to adjust my braking points for each and every corner of tracks that I think I know well, such as Bathurst: I have to brake earlier for most corners to set the car up for its understeer on corner exits, but I can be a little braver and later on the brakes on hard braking zones, such as going from Conrod Straight into The Chase? It's a bit of a "findmuck" for me personally, if you catch my drift.
Add to all that the fact that the car just seemingly has no consistency in how it behaves from corner to corner, any sort of linearity in how it approaches its limits, nor makes any attempt to communicate to me at any time, and the SS is more than just a confusing drive; it's vague and downright dangerous—ask Rick if you don't believe me, whom I collected after wiping out at Bathurst's McPhillamy Park, and then promptly went off at the same corner again in a four lap race... at a track I'm most confident on.
It's hard to describe what exactly is so weird about the driving dynamics of the SS, given that I still feel no more knowledgeable about how it drives after all this time than when I first joined the week's lobby with a fresh odometer, but I'll try, anyway: the car's turning radius is just... too disproportionate with its speed. It stops and turns well when coasting and braking, but on fast sweepers where you don't have to completely lift off the throttle, such as the aforementioned McPhillamy Park, it felt as if the differential never lets go of the axles of the car, resulting in horrific, unexpected understeer at speeds I'd like to think no mere mortal can adequately react to. The car itself seemingly makes no attempt to communicate to me via tyre squeals, steering feel, or any other avenue of communication until it exceeds its limits, which makes trying to understand the car and feeling one's way up to its limits a complete crapshoot. As a result of this, I always felt like I was underutilising the car's full capabilities, and I have a whole afternoon's worth of dead last (or near enough thereabouts) results to prove that gut feeling true. When I try to turn it harder or give it gas sooner however, the entire car just gets paralysed with understeer. It seemed to me in the replays that my peers were chucking the car into a corner in a violent, sudden fashion, almost as though driving on dirt, while I'm trying to soothe and ease the car into corners with gradual, smooth trail braking. Maybe this front heavy, AWD hatch demands to be abused and manhandled that way, but I'm just not conditioned to think that treating a car that way is okay.
A lot of the car's performance I feel is thanks to the immense grip of the front tyres; I theorise that it really, really hates downgraded or worn rubber, hence why RX8 loathed the car so much when he drove it on Sport Soft tyres when we tested the Zagato. Thing is, with a front heavy hatch putting down more of the 411kW through the front tyres than it should, the car destroys front tyres faster than dieselgate destroyed the stock prices of VAG. I really don't fancy the thought of driving this in the wet, or with any meaningful tyre wear multiplier, nor do I think a RWD conversion to fit into Gr. 3 would be feasible for this car with its lopsided weight distribution.
I didn't much like the Beetle Gr. 3 in the short distance I've driven mine, but even that thing feels more predictable than the SS despite having a tiny, peaky turbocharged engine outputting 591HP, not to mention having way better tyre life as well. It's so weird how being AWD seems to be a curse more than anything in this game; you'd think giving a Nissan GT-R back its ATTESA AWD, the car that can be cited for the widespread ban of AWD on tarmac races, would cause total anarchy and annihilation, but noooope, the GT-R Gr. 4 is almost the worst car you could pick for its category (this is my mini review of the GT-R Gr. 4 I'm sorry Nismo). Similarly, one would think that having a powerful AWD car weighing only 2,646lbs with aero would make for an absolute weapon, but... the SS sucks so much that its Roadster and Beetle siblings made it to Gr. 3 when it couldn't.
Is it a bad car? If I force myself to be a bit more factual than usual, I really can't say. It could be fast, it could be fun. It certainly doesn't belong in the same conversation as other garbage cars we've tested here like the Vijizz and Veneno, but it's oddly kryptonitic for Singaporean weebs. I just personally can't get a read on the car, much less mesh with it. For my own million credits, I'd even take a BMW VGT, a car that I said I'm "ambivalent" towards, over the SS. Or, you know, I could just get a Gr. 3 AND a Gr. B cars and still have 100k change left over. The only thing I cherish from my time with the SS is Lapiz Blue, and my car isn't even blue. Boo.
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