Launched in mid 1970s in Europe, the Volkswagen GTI made its American debut a few years later and became the original pocket rocket, a nimble, dynamic, compact vehicle that did for imports what muscle cars had done for Detroit a decade earlier.

Using the then brand-new VW Golf as their platform (at first, the Golf was sold as the Rabbit in the United States), a group of Volkswagen engineers, working on their own and without formal corporate approval, hot-rodded the replacement for the original Beetle into an exciting performance car that went into production wearing GTI designation. VW executives hoped to sell as many as 5000 of these sporty hatchbacks; over the next 25 years enthusiastic drivers would buy more than 1.4 million of them.