► We look at the most iconic hot hatches
► How much are they now?
► A trip down memory lane…
Hot hatches are very much thing in 2025, and there are even a solid crop of electric hot hatches too. If you’re after an ICE hot hatch, however, it’s hard to look past Honda’s £47k Civic Type R. A great in waiting, it combines instant turbocharged power with the driver engagement and poise this side of a Porsche 911 GT3. But if it’s a hot hatch icon you’re after, the likes of Lancia’s Delta Integrale and the Renault 5 Turbo have to be on your watch list…
Keep reading for our rundown of the best hot hatch icons, and how to put a legend in your lock-up.
Renault 5 Turbo 2
One winter Sunday night in 1997 I was taught a humbling lesson – that turbocharging in a lightweight Renault gets results.
On a riot of an A-road I knew like the back of my hand, a pair of headlights caught me through a village. As the speed limit lifted, I decided to show this upstart all the straight-line bombast my 205 XS could muster, clogging it in third and letting the Pug’s sawn-off gearing and insignificant mass do the rest.
Except that rather than freefall in my mirrors, the headlights came alongside before overtaking with a clean precision my poor brain found difficult to comprehend. Those lights belonged to a Renault 5 GT Turbo – and clearly its pilot was having fun. For the next 10 miles or so they ripped on ahead, only to pull over, let me pass, and then overtake me with impunity all over again, like a Spitfire toying with a lost and damaged Dornier.
The front-engined Renault 5 GT Turbo made 115bhp initially, 120bhp later, from an unlikely combination of ancient pushrod four and a Garrett T3 turbo. It was also light; at 850kg, it was lighter even than a 205. I’d never encountered anything like it, but it could have been worse. Those lights could have belonged to a 5 Turbo, the mid-engined miscreant Renault put out in the giddy early years of its infatuation with forced induction.
The 5 Turbo arrived in 1980, a homologation oddball created in response to the success of the mid-engined Lancia Stratos in rallying and given an unlikely elegance by Marcello Gandini at Bertone. Its longitudinal, mid-mounted 1397cc four was good for 160bhp, a towering figure for a sub-1000kg car in the early ’80s. Fewer than 2000 5 Turbos were built, their whole the sum of some eclectic parts, from Alpine A310 suspension through lightweight aluminium panels to a fever dream of an interior.
The later 2 was more numerous (more than 3000 were built), more affordable, and only slightly heavier. This 38,000-mile 2 from 1984 belonged to George Thatcher, marketing man at specialists 4 Star Classics in Hampshire.
‘It’s just great fun, and I like this car’s rare colour, Bleu Marine – most of them are white or red,” he tells me. “Don’t get me wrong. Compared with a Delta Integrale, a 5 Turbo simply isn’t as fast. And it’s not up there with the greatest driver’s cars of all time, either. But there’s so much drama to the way they drive, and for me, it’s the ultimate ’80s hot hatch. It’s loud, there’s decent midrange and things get exciting when the turbo spools up.
‘They were a good rally car too [particularly on twisty tarmac – 5s won the Monte three times]. We just sold this one. The more desirable Turbo 1s are somewhere between £110k and £140k. In terms of running one, there are specialists like 3S Developpement [3sdeveloppement.fr] who can get parts. And JPR Classics [jprclassics.co.uk] are a good bet for servicing in the UK – setting up the mechanical fuel injection is an art form, and they’re sensitive cars.’
Sensitive and spectacular.
Ben Miller
Specifications
- Price then/value now: £8.5k/£90k
- Powertrain: 1397cc 8v turbocharged inline-four, five-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
- Performance: 160bhp @ 6000rpm, 155lb ft @ 3250rpm, 7.7sec 0-62mph, 126mph
- Legacy: The wild competition- only Maxi; Max Power’s wide-arch obsession; the Clio V6
Subaru Impreza (not a hatch, but hot)
And so began our brief but passionate fling with rally-bred Japanese oddities.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was captivated. It was the summer holidays, I was 10 years old and we were in Wales visiting family friends. Their son, also visiting, had a red Alfa 164 but it turned invisible when I saw the metallic silver creation parked alongside. Foglight covers like a rally car, gold wheels, that continuous one-piece-arc rear wing. It was an Impreza WRX STi (Version IV, it turned out), and it belonged to his friend Geraint, coincidentally popping round to visit too.
Everyone went inside for a cup of tea and a chat but I stayed on the driveway, transfixed, circling the Impreza like it was a grounded UFO. After a while, Geraint appeared, and asked if I’d like a ride in it. Really? Yes!
I climbed onto the front passenger sports seat’s bumpy fabric topography, and my dad hopped in the back. I remember the rest of the interior looked a bit disappointingly ordinary. The boxer engine fired and settled into an unusual gruff, thrummy idle sound. We rumbled away into traffic, and initially, my excitement petered away. This is just an ordinary car after all. It feels like our family Austin Montego.
Then the road unwound onto a short, well-sighted straight, and suddenly we were overtaking one, two, three cars in one gear. “The nice thing is, you’re not on the wrong side of the road for very long…” I remember Geraint saying. That unfamiliar gruff engine sound was back, louder now, and acceleration like I’d never felt before. And grip. I didn’t know a car could corner like this. (Back then, I know now, not many could.) On the same straight on the way back, now deserted, he demo’d the brakes, which impressed me even more than everything else so far. And when we returned to the village, it turned back into a normal car.
‘That’s what impresses me,’ I remember him saying. ‘That it can be both.’ (He wasn’t a nutter, by the way. I remember my dad, as good an arbiter of safe driving as I’ve ever known, commenting later that Geraint drove us as safely as he did quickly.)
I’ve wanted a WRX STi ever since. I was a student when they were cheap, and therefore couldn’t afford one. As an adult, the cheap ones were too ratty or too questionably modified, and the good ones – like this immaculate Turbo 2000 advertised by 4 Star Classics – are good money. Although, at £14,995, this car’s not out of reach.
Some very much are. The 22B – the Holy Grail of Imprezas – is worth £170k+. The 1000-off, blue-only two-door P1 is iconic too, and £10k for a very rough car but £45k top-dollar. The 444-off RB5 (RB for Richard Burns, the 2001 world rally champion taken too soon) can top £35k, but tidy sub-£20k cars are out there.
There have been great later-generation Impreza models since, too. But there’s something so pure about that early car’s shape. So much so that artist Benedict Radcliffe recreated it as a fluorescent wire-frame sculpture in 2005. He knew a good thing when he saw it; even at 10, I knew I had too.
James Taylor
Specifications
- Price then/value now: £17k/£15k
- Powertrain: 1994cc 16v turbocharged boxer-four, five-speed manual, all-wheel drive
- Performance: 208bhp @ 5600rpm, 214lb ft @ 4000rpm, 5.8sec 0-60mph, 137mph
- Legacy: Ever more niche Imprezas; countless beanie and anorak sales; Prodrive’s restomod P25
Lancia Delta Integrale Evo 2
Never has racing improved the breed so obviously as with the none-more-’80s Delta.
4 Star’s Jim Gillett is unequivocal: ‘In terms of heroes it’s safe to meet, there are two: the Delta Integrale and the Peugeot 205 GTI. Integrales still feel special. They’re light, the driving position and steering wheel placement are perfect, you’ve got the superb visibility thanks to the slim pillars, they’re fast and they just grip – you can really lean on them. Yes, they’re classically Italian, in that the cheap plastic interior trim squeaks as you go, but they’re awesome to drive and you can uprate them pretty easily, from a little more power to nearly 300bhp.
‘People always want these cars, and in part because they were sold in the UK – there’s that nostalgia. For me, looks-wise, they’re like a Mk2 Golf GTI on steroids, with the wide arches and double headlights. I always wanted one back then. Still do.’
You and me both, Jim.
That the Integrale Evo 2 was descended from the unassuming if elegant Giugiaro-penned five-door hatch Lancia introduced in 1979 is perhaps the greatest single example of racing improving the breed. The original Delta may have scooped European Car of the Year honours in 1980, but it wasn’t until 1983, and the turbocharged HF, that things began to warm up. The Delta now had one of its magic ingredients. The other, four-wheel drive, arrived in production guise with the Delta HF 4WD in 1986 but had been in development long before that, using a modified version of the S4 rally car’s powertrain.
With the end of the ferocious – and ferociously dangerous – Group B era, Lancia’s high-performance and reliable four-wheel-drive system, with its three differentials, became a key asset. If power could no longer deliver a competitive edge (and it couldn’t, thanks to Group A’s baked-in turbo restrictors), then making the most of the power you did have was key. The Group A Delta HF 4WD won the ’87 season opener and that season’s championships for both driver and manufacturer.
And from there the Delta just kept getting faster. A 16-valve engine, with corresponding bonnet bulge, arrived in 1989, and the type peaked with Evoluzione in 1991. Lancia won the last of its six consecutive constructors’ titles in 1992, and the Evo 2 – which wasn’t sold to homologate a competition car – was its lantern-jawed gift to the world.
Values for the ultra-rare, Japan-only Final Edition cars, finished as they were in heart-stoppingly perfect Rosso Amaranto with a yellow and blue stripe, continue to pull Delta Integrale values north. A low-mileage Final Edition sold for £225k a couple of years ago. But Evo 2s are still the right side of £100k. This 70,000-mile Monza Red example is up for £84k. A heroic amount of money for a 30-year-old five-door, sure, but this is the humble hatchback at its most heroic.
Ben Miller
Specifications
- Price then/value now: £25k/£84k
- Powertrain: 1995cc 16v turbocharged inline-four, five-speed manual, all-wheel drive
- Performance: 212bhp @ 5750rpm, 232lb ft @ 2500rpm, 5.7sec 0-62mph, 137mph
- Legacy: NOT the 2007 Lancia Delta
Ford Escort RS Cosworth
A dull Escort transformed by the genius of Ford Special Vehicle Operations.
Has any car nabbed victory from the jaws of defeat quite like the Escort RS Cosworth? Georg Kacher told readers of CAR’s October 1990 issue, ‘there’s little pleasure to be gained from driving the new Escorts and Orions,’ only for Ford Special Vehicle Operations to pull the Escort RS Cosworth from its hat two years later: a Group A WRC special so desirable and exciting it rarely remained where you parked it.
The king Escort isn’t really an Escort at all, of course, as oversized bodywork designed by the now-defunct MGA Developments strongly suggests – and nor was it truly victorious, judged against its avowed mission of winning the WRC.
The Cosworth suffix relates to the YB engine – a donkey’s-old Pinto block mated to a far more sophisticated Cosworth twin-cam turbo head. It drives through a five-speed manual and sends power to 16-inch alloys via an all-wheel-drive system that splits power 34:66 front to rear.
These are Sierra Sapphire Cosworth 4×4 mechanicals wrapped up with the bad attitude of the original (and closely related) three-door Sierra Cosworth, wild rear wing and all. There’s Escort in there somewhere, but only in the same way there’s shot in a pheasant.
A minimum of 2500 Escort Cossies had to be produced for Group A homologation requirements, but 7145 actually rolled from coachbuilder Karmann’s German plant from 1992 until 1996.
The first 2500 cars had a T3 Garrett ‘big turbo’ set-up well suited to motorsport but laggy for the road. The remainder downsized to a T25 blower once homologation requirements were satisfied – power dropped a fraction from 224bhp to 217bhp, there was less tuning potential, but this is the more driveable standard road engine.
The Cossie never won the World Rally Championship, but François Delecour clinched second on its 1993 Monte Carlo debut and took overall victory ahead of Evos, Imprezas, and Celicas the following year.
This Monte Carlo from 4 Star Classics is one of only 200 examples built to celebrate that success. Finished in Mallard Green, it has “Motorsport”-logo’d cloth Recaros, 16-inch OZ Racing alloys that do a fair impression of the wheels the works car wore and the must-have rear wing – a delete option on later models. It’s yours for £74,995, or half as much as the most expensive example we could find advertised in the UK.
A WRC championship might have eluded it, but the Escort RS Cosworth was a success in the showroom and provided a much-needed halo not just for a humdrum Escort range, but for the entire Ford line-up. Two out of three ain’t bad.
Ben Barry
Specifications
- Price then/value now: £26k/£75k
- Powertrain: 1993cc 16v turbocharged inline-four, five-speed manual, all-wheel drive
- Performance: 217bhp @ 6250rpm, 214lb ft @ 3500rpm, 6.1sec 0-62mph, 140mph
- Legacy: Ford’s last Cosworth and final rally-bred homologation special
VW Golf G60 Limited
The Mk1 Golf was both a big leap for Volkswagen – which up to that point had been defined by the Beetle – and simultaneously a cautious toe in the water, as its largely conservative line-up attests. But the Mk2 flipped that logic on its head. This time the fundamentals evolved only gently, but VW went bananas with some of the Mk2’s many variants.
Broadly there are three hi-perf Mk2s, dubbed GTI, G60 and Rallye. All are highly collectible today but none compares with the exclusivity of the Golf G60 Limited – a Mk2 that combines all the innovations and options of its siblings with an understated, school-run-friendly body. Kind of Golf does original BMW M5.
Just 71 examples were hand-assembled at Volkswagen Motorsport, Hanover, all left-hookers. This 1989 example is number 16, has covered 67,000 miles and is up for £57k at 4 Star.
New technology birthed these blossoming Mk2 Golf ABS as standard.
It’s a luxurious street sleeper where modern sports-car collectibles are all outta-my-way looks and stripped-out innards – and that only makes us desire a G60 Limited all the more.
Ben Barry
Specifications
- Price then/value now: £27k/£57k
- Powertrain: 1781cc 16v supercharged inline-four, five-speed manual, all-wheel drive
- Performance: 207bhp @ 6500rpm, 186lb ft @ 5000rpm, 6.8sec 0-60mph, 140mph
- Legacy: Closest VW came to the Golf R before the Golf R
With huge thanks to 4 Star Classics for their assistance – check their inventory at 4starclassics.com. Current prices as of the time of publication in June 2023.