THIS WEEK I have been driving a birthday present, although sadly not mine.

The Volkswagen Golf GTI Edition 50 is the car Wolfsburg has built to celebrate half a century of the GTI, and since the badge and I were both born in 1976, spending our shared 50th together on Irish roads felt like the decent thing to do.

One of us has 325 horsepower and a Nürburgring lap record. The other one has dodgy hips. 

The Edition 50 is, in short, a weapon.

The exhaust snarls in a way no Golf has quite managed before, the grip is limpet-like, and you sit in brilliant bucket seats holding a steering wheel trimmed in what Volkswagen calls ArtVelours microfleece and what everyone else calls Alcantara.

It is the most powerful and fastest production Golf GTI there has ever been.

And yet, when you have had your fun, it will pootle home quietly and swallow the groceries, because it is still a Golf, and that has always been the entire point.

Fifty years on, the trick still works: a car that behaves itself all week and misbehaves beautifully on request.

The only thing that has stopped behaving is the price.

The Edition 50 starts at €74,795 on the road in Ireland, and the car I have been driving, with its optional extras, lands north of €84,000.

You can blame the tax system for a chunk of that. At 173g/km of CO2, the anniversary car tips into the 35% VRT band, a full five points more than the standard GTI, which itself now starts at €62,760.

The founding promise of the GTI, dreamed up in a Wolfsburg flat, was pure dynamics at a cool price. Fifty years of CO2-based taxation have quietly strangled the second half of that sentence in Ireland, and it is worth pausing on the fact that the people’s hot hatch now costs more than a very nice three-bed did when the Mk2 was on sale.

The car that was never supposed to exist

The strange thing about the GTI, and the bit I love most, is that it was never supposed to exist. In the mid-1970s, while Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd filled the stadiums, five Volkswagen employees began meeting in a private flat in Wolfsburg to plot something the company had never asked for.

An engineer, a chassis expert, a marketing man, the head of development Hermann Hablitzel and, brilliantly, the head of press Anton Konrad. Their plan was a properly quick Golf that ordinary people could afford. The code name was Sport Golf, and when they showed their first prototype, Scirocco-based and infernally loud, to Volkswagen’s head of development, Professor Ernst Fiala, his verdict was two words: “You’re crazy.”

They carried on anyway, undercover, until the........

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