Why The 577bhp Vauxhall VXR8 GTS Proves Australia Is The Real King Of Muscle

When you think about muscle cars, you think ‘Murica, bonkers straight-line speed and appalling driving dynamics. Except, here’s the thing: that’s just not true anymore. Modern muscle cars coming out of America are actually bloody good, offering decent interiors and cornering ability that keeps their European counterparts honest.

And that’s where the Vauxhall VXR8 GTS comes in; big, brash and boisterous, shrouded in a cloud of tyre smoke. It might be wearing the British Griffin badge, but beneath the beefy body panels it’s almost entirely Holden. In fact, the steering wheel still wears the Holden Special Vehicles logo.

The VXR8 GTS has the 6.2-litre supercharged LSA V8 you’ll find in the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1. It makes 577bhp and 546b ft of torque - 150bhp and 140lb ft more than the old LS3-engined VXR8 - a frankly potty number for such an unsophisticated car to pummel into the ground. The theoretical 0-62mph time is 4.1 seconds, but whoever hooked the car up to post that time deserves a medal.

A brief history lesson for context: The VXR8 is the spiritual successor to the Monaro, and you don’t have to drive it long to discover that this LSA version is more like the Monaro than the LS3 VXR8 that it succeeds. The Monaro is unashamedly all drivetrain; the interior is faintly terrible and its driving characteristics are best described as ‘terrifyingly oversteery’. I spent a few hours with one a couple of years ago, and you honestly don’t care about any of that, instead revelling in the huge dollops of torque that spin the wheels at seemingly any throttle input, and the mad supercharger whine that takes over the cabin.

When it was replaced by the VXR8, it felt like Vauxhall was trying to be a bit more sophisticated, largely down to the improved interior and dip in power. And that made it a little underwhelming. Still a bit wild mind - 425bhp is not to be sniffed at, after all - just not quite to the level of what’d gone before.

Which brings us neatly back to the new VXR8 GTS, and before we get on to the hilarious drivetrain, let me spit some hate. The interior looks fairly nice, but the materials are mostly cheap and nasty with the worst head-up display I’ve ever used, the turbo pressure and oil temperature gauges look like they were fitted using a £2 eBay cluster, and the entertainment system is about as complicated and unintuitive as it gets. In fact, the satellite navigation’s maps were so out of date that a massively redesigned junction wasn’t loaded in, leaving Captain Sense of Direction over here guessing and heading in the wrong direction just five minutes after leaving Vauxhall HQ.

Then there’s the six-speed automatic gearbox, which was fitted to our test car, simply because the last time we drove a VXR8 it was a manual and we fancied a bit of a change. We should’ve stuck with the stick. The auto feels distinctly old school, especially since we’ve become accustomed to the whipcrack fast and super-intelligent dual-clutch systems offered up by the likes of the VW Group.

I’ve never driven a stock car that lets you spin the wheels up so easily. It'll even get loose if you mash the throttle while cruising at 40mph...

It’s easy to catch the slush box out when accelerating slowly, as it holds on to gears a bit too long when you want it to shift up and cruise. And when you’re hustling and using the wheel-mounted paddles instead, it’s not much better. Shift down before it’s happy and it’ll wait; shift up and it can feel like there’s as much as a second’s wait for the gear to change. In all fairness, when it eventually does shift, it swaps cogs fairly quickly, with little noticeable loss of momentum.

So far, so negative, so how exactly did this big Aussie brute charm me? Yeah, you guessed it: that engine. It’s wonderful. It’s so incredibly lazy most of the time, hovering around 1000rpm at cruising speeds (assuming the gearbox hasn’t decided to hang out in the lower gears, of course), but the second you push on it comes alive.

From half throttle onwards, you’ll be spinning the rears. Hard launches are an art form because the car just wants to get loose; it’s like the guys behind it decided to put all of their funding into the engine without caring about how the power would actually reach the road.

I’ve never driven a stock, factory car in which you can be driving along sedately at 40mph, prod the throttle fairly gently, and have the rears light up. It’s pure, unadulterated, immature genius.

The VXR8 feels as heavy to drive as it looks, and has a soft ride that you’ll be pleased about right up until you try to attack a twisty road. Cornering is at best wallowing and at worst like a ship in a storm. But you quickly learn its limitations and instead just revel in that bananas power delivery, making sure you’ve reigned everything in for the corner.

Vauxhall will try to tell you that this is a rival for the BMW M5 and Mercedes-AMG E63, saying that it’s more powerful than both and far less expensive, too. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story. The Aussie is nowhere near as refined, thanks to its cheap interior, lumbering cornering style, and inability to do anything but pull burnouts.

All in all, it’s hard to recommend the VXR8. It channels everything that leaves petrolheads so divided on American muscle, and for that reason you can’t help but appreciate its simple premise in an age of insanely complicated motors. Just not at this price point. You might forgive its foibles at £35,000, but when you’re expected to cough up £56,243? Let’s just say you could do a lot better for the money.

I loved the VXR8 GTS during my short time with it, because I met up with my mates and just pulled burnouts constantly, taking people for rides where I’d spin the wheels at every inappropriate opportunity. But at the end of the day it’s a one trick pony, and its inability to actually catapult you along a fun road would likely wear thin - I met up with the rest of the Car Throttle crew one Sunday morning, and keeping up with the others was a chore rather than a challenge.

I applaud the 30 to 40 people who buy one each year. It’s hilarious fun when you want it to be, but you really do have to have an insane commitment to being different for the purchase to make sense…