Sport Compact Car Revival

FOUR POCKET ROCKETS VIE FOR THE TITLE OF BEST HOT HATCH

- Christian Seabaugh

Every generation has one. Volkswagen Golf GTI. Acura Integra GS-R. Mitsubishi Evo. If you smuggled automotive magazines in from Europe, perhaps it was the Renault 5 Turbo or Ford Escort Cosworth.

No matter who you are or where you grew up, odds are you remember your first hot hatch—a plebeian-skinned powerhouse designed around the democratization of performance and practicality. Some looked like ATMs on wheels; others had sloping lines approximating a coupe. But they all held the same secret: startling horsepower and tight handling underneath their econobox sheet metal.

Me? I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Subaru WRX. I was about 12 years old. It was a snowy winter morning, made colder by the wind ripping off an angry Hudson River. My dad and I were lugging my hockey gear through the parking lot of Manhattan’s Sky Rink at some ungodly pre-dawn hour for practice. He pointed to some bug-eyed car parked alongside the pier.

“You see that?” he asked. “It’s a Subaru WRX. I read that it was faster than a 911.”

“That thing?”

I could hardly believe it, but I loved the idea that a relatively affordable, dorky looking compact could smoke a sleek, expensive Porsche. A new PlayStation 2 and copy of Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec under the Christmas tree only cemented the love of cars like the Subaru WRX and its rival Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII—not just for me but for millennials and Gen Xers across the country. Then the 2008 recession took the wind out of the economy and killed the sport compact car—as well as the eponymous magazine.