Mk1 VW Golf 2.0 litre 16 valve Club Championship Winner

[sports racer]

Back in the 90's I don't think there was a single hot Golf that didn't have some part from Brian (GTI Imports). Even now I'm still getting stuff off him.

Hunter, taxidermist, Baptist minister and racing car driver/builder. Next time I'm at a trivia night I know who I want on my team.

[Redlina]

So now I'm after a new shell for my club car. Trouble is - by now 25 years of humid Australian weather has caught up with most Mk1's and a reasonable body is hard to find. I know this first hand because over the last few years while I was racing my red Golf I've been continually buying them as they fail road worthiness & wrecking them for parts. Having dismantled 22 for parts (that is no exaggeration), I can now strip one on the trailer in a single day - but in all those didn't find one shell worth keeping as a spare. Then one of the guys in my car club who's a car hoarder tells me his wife's old Mk1 is under a tree on his acreage out of town, so I go up to have a look. Well this place turns out to be a car graveyard... cars tightly stacked in. He's got several Mk1 Golfs - but they are truly disintegrating because they're all parked under pine trees and their needles have covered them and held moisture. I walk around one of them and can poke my fingers through EVERY horizontal surface, including the top edges of the doors at the bottom of the windows. If you tried to move or winch this poor old thing out it'd just collapse in on itself. I laughingly ask him if I can buy it to enter in my upcoming MG car club concourse just as an affront to all the spit & polish boys - but he won't even loan it to me because he's still got plans for it! We find his wife's car. It's got rust (which I think I can get repaired), but it's Kermit green!



We put a battery on it and it runs! Smokey as hell, but I can drive it out and onto my trailer. When I get it home & get the front guards off I find serious corrosion, but thankfully it's fixable with some plating and the addition of steel brackets I make which go from the A pillar door mounts and along underneath the top of the top rail to the front strut towers. VW added a similar bracket into South African Mk1's so they'd handle the rough dirt roads there. These days you can buy laser cut fender braces, but back in the day I had to design & make them myself. They stop stiff suspension bending your car in half!





This rust was a very common problem on Mk1's, caused by debris falling through the louvers under the windscreen and then blocking up the tapered rubber drain plug holes above the wheel arches. I used to fix this by removing the rubber tubes & drilling extra holes in the side of the inner guards to provide extra drainage. You can see how VW ended up doing exactly the same thing like on this Mk4 with rough holes they added on both sides in later models.



Once my repairs are made the car goes off to the spray painter's for a change of colour. There is no way I am driving a car everyone will call "Kermit". While it's away I strip the damaged red Golf so I'm ready for the re-assembly when my nice shiny car returns.



Check out that A pillar corrosion. It needed serious plating.

[VWMAT5]

The Mk1s have a habit of 'dancing'. This was in 2012 at a Sprint Event at Nambucca. We managed to get it up on one wheel. Driver and car survived back on all four - driver required a change of underwear

[SMOK]

Good read so far, love the old photos. Thank you and keep going!

[Redlina]

The Mk1 comes back from the body shop sporting it's super bright yellow paint change, and looking nothing like the forlorn green car I pulled out from under a tree just a few weeks previously. The car came up even better than I'd hoped, and fitting all the parts scavenged from the damaged red shell takes very little time and goes without problems. I see an old American VW motoring magazine advert for the Superbug which put their logo within the Superman logo, and I color this symbol & emblaze it across my bonnet and chest. It works, as the car resumes it's winning ways, scoring victories in my Newcastle club outright championships, several NSW state khanacross & Rallysprint titles, and is a demon in dirt & tar motorkhanas. Sometimes I even drive it to work!







Within a few weeks of getting the 2.0 litre 16 valve re-shelled & back on the track I am approached by the guy who first told me about this conversion. He wants to sell his mint condition white GLS - the one I saw racing when I first went to a race meeting after moving up to Newcastle. Because he's put a half cage in it he can't sell it as a road car, wants it to go into caring hands, and offers it to me for just $500. What the hell. I grab it. Now I'm looking at this second Mk1 in my driveway, and realise over time I have accumulated some SERIOUS go fast bits for a 1.6. So I out of my pile of parts I add a huge Weber carby to it, a 11:1 high compression flowed head with enlarged Alfa Romeo valves - ported & polished, and a FULL race cam with profiles almost as square as a Lego block. When I get it dyno tuned the mechanic describes the cam as being "like a chainsaw". It makes 110bhp at the wheels, and becomes my daily driver and second race car.

So without ever planning to, I start running a Mk1 team, offering friends & family drives in the white car. Both are frequent winners.



So that's where this story ends. Two Mk1 race cars, 100% reliable, one with smooth, effortless torque driven power on tap, and the other with an explosive personality like a roller coaster. What happened to them? Well I started to have problems with the 2.0 litre car's mechanical fuel injection, then my nephew suggested I look at a Honda Civic. V-Tec will change my life. I sell both cars and jump into the deep end with Hondas. But I redeem myself, as I am now building a Mk4 Golf into a dirt club car for my son (see my other post here), so maybe you can forgive me for being corrupted by Japan.

[sports racer]

I hate sad endings.

You know the only way you can redeem yourself is to build another MK1.

[Redlina]

Epilogue: I sold my yellow 2.0 litre 16 valve Mk1 Golf to a guy from the Central Coast who basically just put it in a container with all the spares I sold him with it. But then he sold it... to of all people Stephen Muller from Volksmuller Sydney, who'd seen the car race in Rallysprints at Awaba Newcastle and Nabiac, where I beat his VW Beetle on a number of occasions. He got it for his son, who raced it. They've just got another shell for it, and Stephen has told me I can expect to see the car back on the track again before too long. Where the white one went I have no idea - but it's body was truly mint. I knew a woman like that once, and she was white too!

Yes, Sports Racer, I had a chequered and very unusual CV. You can also include Film & videotape editor, news cameraman, and drug & alcohol councilor to my career history. But if you go to trivia nights I wonder if you can spot the common thread between being a clergyman and a professional taxidermist???

[sports racer]

Both professions stuff things up?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

At a guess I'd say both professions like to see an outcome even after death.

Cheers

Paul

[Redlina]

Near enough Paul - both professions are based on life after death! I'm impressed you worked that out mate... no-one else has.

[browndizzle]

This is absolutely incredible. 'nuff said.

the guy you sold the yellow 16v to sounds like a guy i came across last year and just missed out on buying his mk1! turned out it was mikinoz's old mk1 can the guy had it in a storage shed for something close to or more than 1.5 years! body and everything was outstandingly mint! stick kick myself everyday for not managing to get it, but in saying that, grabbed myself a beauty anyway haha

love hearing these stories, always seems like its just the tip of the iceberg n just wanna hear more