Golf R Headlight

Journey to the MK7

The first consideration I faced when deciding to move onto a different automobile was to find something that had a high level of aftermarket parts support. From the beginning I anticipated modifying the car to some extent and having a readily available supply of parts and various options was something I wanted to be sure existed.

I looked over a few sites that had compiled rankings of “most modified cars” and picked from these sites to make my own list of candidate cars. For each site that mentioned a vehicle I would give that car a vote. One site even ranked the cars, which I mirrored in my modified car comparison table. The table I came up with is shown below:

Modded Car Votes

From the list that resulted I started to apply some of my own criteria. I wanted a vehicle that was produced in decent numbers and was accessible to a large number of consumers. The Ford Mustang GT was a leader in this respect, the number of these cars manufactured monthly is staggering. I also favor forced induction and all-wheel drive vehicles, this narrowed me down to the Subaru WRX STI, Mitsubishi EVO, and Volkswagen GTI’s big brother, the Golf R.

Being a longtime owner of a VAG product, the Audi B5 S4, I already had familiarity with some of the tools used with the platforms as well as the communities that follow the Volkswagen and Audi product lines. I also was familiar with a large number of the vendors providing products for these vehicles.