It looked – and sounded – like the firm’s hot hatch loyalists had convened to march straight into the Ford Focus ST camp in Cologne and burn it down.

The GTIs didn’t charge into an oily, metallic battle. They trekked out to their home town to participate in the second annual GTI Coming Home meeting held on the first Saturday of September 2018. Fans from all over Europe celebrated the GTI and, more often than not, the great many tuning possibilities it opens up. Anything VW that wears a GTI badge is OK, so we're not talking about just Golfs. And as we'll see, there were a few interlopers as well.

Here are some of the highlights Autocar spotted at the event: