YOU know you’ve got a seriously good car underneath you when it starts to pour and you crack a sly smile. So it is with the Volkswagen Golf R, which sticks to rain-slicked roads like chewing gum clings to hair.

Corner coming up? Feel free to jink the wheel with calculated bravery. The Golf will dive gracefully in, even at a pace that has you convinced you’ll skitter off the road like a baby elephant on roller skates. Accelerate hard to blast your way back out, and the VW really hunkers down, actively pivoting itself to stick heroically to your chosen line.

What the Golf R has to teach the motoring world is that it’s one thing to have lots of horsepower, and quite another to put it all down to the road cleanly. It turns out that in addition to packing a potent, 2.0-litre turbo engine that musters 320 horses, it has a chassis with smooth sophistication coming out of its ears (so much so that I hear its all-wheel drive system is currently in talks to play the next James Bond).

In fact, if anything, the engine is the weak part of the Golf R’s game. It packs a mighty punch, but apart from the occasional fizzy crackle from the quad-pipe exhaust system, it doesn’t quite have the charisma to make the skin tingle.

On the other hand, the chassis is a marvel. The all-wheel drive system doles out the engine’s hearty servings of torque where they’re most needed, diverting it to the rear axle smoothly to improve traction, and even carefully measuring out how much each back tyre receives. There’s no torque steer (that disconcerting tugging on the wheel that you get from some brawny front-wheel drive cars), no understeer (that nose-running-wide moment that makes you call out to mummy) and no wheelspin.

Whatever it is, this might be the Golf with balls, but its dynamic abilities don’t require you to have large ones to make the most of it.

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It’s all the more impressive that the Golf R doesn’t comport itself like a thug. The suspension is just as suave as the handling, at least when you dial it in accordingly.

Unless I counted wrong, you can set the dampers to 15 different levels of firmness, and while you’re at it, you can also play with the steering heft, the drivetrain’s responsiveness, and even the sound of the engine. This means you can have your Golf R just-so, and it’s actually sweetest when you make the engine and gearbox lively but keep the shock absorbers relatively soft. You get plenty of feedback from the chassis that way, don’t have the skittishness of a rock-hard ride, and still have ready access to the engine’s brute force.

The built-in driving modes reveal the car’s sense of playfulness, too. There’s also a handy “R” button on the steering wheel that lets you call up the raciest settings straight away, and a Drift mode so you can light up the rear tyres and tail-slide your way to motoring nirvana. Both of those are meant for racetrack use only of course, but there’s even a setting for the Nurburgring, perhaps the most famous (and daunting) racing circuit of them all.

The bad news is, that little “R” button is the single best thing about the Golf R’s cabin. It does have racy seats with cool flashes of blue on the upholstery, but the irritations that afflict the basic Golf are all here, too. An over-reliance on touchscreen controls means the sound system and air-con are a pain to use, and just about every little action requires diving into a menu.

With VW splurging on developing electric car tech, you can see where the accountants have been stingy with the Golf, too; the interior is a sea of hard, shiny plastic.

You can’t do anything about that, but you do have a decision to make about whether to drop an extra S$20,000 on your Golf R to make it more hardcore, with the R-Performance Pack.

That includes the aforementioned Drift and Nurburgring driving modes, a titanium exhaust system and a big, swinging rear spoiler. It also raises the car’s top speed by 20 kmh to a heady 270 kmh. In theory, that would make you top dog among your BMW and Mercedes driving friends, because the vast majority of German cars are limited to a snail-like 250.

The Golf R is the kind of car you buy for yourself to enjoy, however, rather than to impress others with a top speed you can’t use. In performance terms it feels like a proper step up from the Golf GTI, itself a formidable car, and the chassis is the stuff of magic. All the rain we’ve had this month has only highlighted how well-sorted the Golf R is. When the sun goes away, this car shines.

Volkswagen Golf R 2.0TSI with R-Performance Package

Engine 1,984 cc, 16-valve, turbocharged in-line four Power 320 hp at 5,350 rpm Torque 420 Nm from 2,100 to 5,350 rpm Gearbox Seven-speed automatic  0-100 kmh 4.7 seconds  Top speed 270 kmh Fuel efficiency 8.4 L/100 km Agent Volkswagen Group Singapore Price S$335,900 with COE Available Now