Now Meet Tomorrow's Hot Hatch Heroes

With the latest Honda Civic Type R raising the stakes in the hot hatch market, we look at how its rivals will respond over the next 12 monthst

- Adam Towler

TWENTY-SEVENTEEN MIGHT JUST GO down as a watershed year in the history of the hot hatch. With 400bhp now the target for the most powerful of the breed, it’s also cause for reflection on what attributes a hot hatch requires to succeed as the decade draws to a close, and what the next batch of new arrivals promise for the years ahead.

First and foremost, can the new Audi RS3 Sportback (Driven, evo 240) even be termed ‘a hot hatch’ given its power (394bhp), acceleration capability (0-62mph in 4.1sec), generous weight (1510kg) and other vitals? Perhaps the time has come to start properly differentiating the merely potent from the extraordinary with some trite term such as ‘superhatch’ or even ‘hyperhatch’.

Then again, not all the new arrivals seem to be complicit with a race for more horsepower, and the third-generation Renault Sport Mégane is a case in point. The Mégane’s substantial portfolio of talents has never been defined by raw power alone, although its numbers have usually been competitive. Nevertheless, in recent years it’s been the trusty 2-litre ‘F4’ engine that has started to show the package’s first signs of weakness in the face of its rivals. In a class where 300bhp has rapidly become to be seen as the minimum required, the old car’s peak of 271bhp (in its ultimate guise), and a top end without the same effervescence as the most potent VW TSI engines, had started to betray its age. Not, it must be said, that we cared: it remained the pick of the bunch to drive right up until its demise.