Now that R32 does look very interesting, although it needs to be available as a 4 door.

It is. Usually listed as 5 doors over here though (including the rear/trunk opening). Up price from 3 door here in Sweden is about $500.

As to extreme Golfs - there's a Swedish guy named Dahlbäck (Dahlbäck Racing) that has borrowed some parts from Audi racing (transmission from late 80s US IMSA series cars and brakes from the German DTM series cars), made lots of own custom stuff and finished with a Golf with 830 hp

Everything in front of the firewall is custom. 60/40 4-wheel drive, 90% diff.brake at the rear. 2.2 liter 5 cylinder engine, big turbo with 2-stage intercooler. 800-900Nm torque. He's aiming at getting it registered for street use, so he has 2 fuel systems, one for standard gas and one for race gas. Also 2 engine control chips that he can switch between. Gets roughly 1.33 miles per gallon in race mode...

As he has test driven it (can be done before actually registering it) he's been stopped by the police once - only complaint was bald tires and an exhaust that wents to the side instead of to the rear. As he said, they didn't realize what the thing really was

I've got an 88MB avi file from a TV show that test drove it (all in swedish though), and if anyone wants a look, I'll toss it on my web server (only 512kbps though).

/Michael