Why all hot hatches shouldn't become AWD - #blogpost by JenstheGTIfreak

09 Dec 2016

Hello everyone and welcome to my blogpost about why all hot hatches shouldn’t become AWD. Before anyone shouts ‘Fokus RS thuuu bezzt’ it is not. No cars is flawless. And for some reason Chris Harris dislikes it quite a bit.

Because we live in a time cars have to be more and more powerful every sort of cars have to face it, even the hot hatches which many people love. Car manufacturers know this too, and unfortunately instead of putting some effort into making a great FWD hot hatch, they just go the easy way and make them AWD

So here are a few reasons to support my opinion:

If you have a classical FWD hot hatch and a classical handbrake, you can have quite a lot of fun doing FWD burnouts. Since you don’t need to use the normal brakes and just can use the handbrake(I know it isn’t happening in the video)the brake pads won’t be worn out and doing a burnout becomes much easier.

As you can see here, it is clear that FWD hot hatches still can be very fast when they are engineered thoroughly. Also it is clear that they don’t handle bad at all.

I've personally heard more people say a FWD hatch handles brilliantly than most AWD hatches.

When watching reviews(I.e. Golf GTI, Civic Type-R, Fiesta ST) I hear the reviewer mostly talk about how brilliantly the cars handle the power through the front wheels which makes turning brilliant. When watching reviews about AWD hot hatches, there nearly always is one thing which is a problem: understeer. Now I know that there are quite a few AWD hot hatches out here which have no problem, but the majority can’t deal with it brilliantly(there are exceptions ofcourse). I ofcourse admit there are quite a few FWD hot hatches which totally can’t do it but knowing from my personal experiences more FWD cars do handle better(you might see it differently).

Most FWD are more fun to drive than their AWD version

Somehow I’ve heard that most FWD hot hatches are more fun to drive. This might be because you can have oversteer in a FWD hot hatch and do awesome burnouts. That most FWD hot hatches have a manual gearbox can also be a reason because they generally have smaller engines.

FWD can't drift? Hell no!

Because the realwheels aren’t being powered it can slide away if you turn it in aggressively. Not everyone can do it obviously, most drivers who did it are professional racing drivers.

Soo this was my post why most hot hatches shouldn’t become AWD. There are obviously exceptions like the Focus RS and some others and there also are some cars which do the exact opposite and are RWD like the BMW M140i. I am not saying AWD is bad but I’m saying AWD should become less of a thing in hot hatches(except for rally legends like the Subaru WRX STI). So that’s that and I hope you enjoyed reading this.

Jens

Comments

Remember that this is just my opinion, you might like AWD a lot and I respect that

MattRobinson

Alot of FWD’s can understeer like hell, but not the GTI at all.

I know, but for that a lot of AWD hot hatches can understeer like crazy

Is this why you asked us to name some AWD hatches?

Yep

Most awd hatches have transverse engines like the FWD ones anyways, so most of the power will go to the front wheels.

But the FWD version have clever diffs, and the AWD ones dont have one or really bad ones which makes cornering bad and AWD makes a car heavier

AWD is cool, but RWD is still the best. Anything but fwd is ok to me though

btw despite that BMW being RWD, and RWD is usally my favorite, I still like the Focus RS more than it. The Ford is just more special

I see

I agree. The one thing I’d have put in though is price. Hot hatches in the 80’s were humble small cars, but much sportier than standard. Now they are so performance orientated and expensive that they are competing with proper sports cars, which dynamically speaking is a fight they will never win