Sommaire pour Autumn 2020 de Performance VW

There was a time when tuning your road car to make it go faster and handle better made a lot of sense. Driving enthusiastically seemed to be far more acceptable back in the day, but as time has gone by and the continuous ‘speed kills’ campaigns taken affect, it’s become increasing hard to enjoy your performance VW on public roads. As a result, track days and single-make race series have never been more popular. And when we think of modified VWs that have really made their mark out on track, then very few will come even close to the late Maurice Reeves and his black 1.8T Mk2 Golf (right). Not only was this car allegedly the first 20vT-swapped Mk2 in the UK, it also ran rings around most of the…

It’s safe to say that by the mid-90s the modified VW scene was on fire and GTI International was the perfect event for enthusiast and traders alike to showcase their cars and latest products in the safe confines of the Transport Research Laboratories. It was busy, bold and at times bonkers. No wonder many that attended consider these to be the glory days of GTI International. Whether you agree or not, there’s no denying that to some degree Inters shaped the scene today as we know it and while the event is sadly no more, it will live on in many of our minds for a whole bunch of reasons. We hope Part 2 of our walk down memory lane brings back a few of those highlights for the veterans…

We’d all been waiting for what felt like so long for this day to come. As COVID restrictions were slightly relaxed, the VWDRC worked with Santa Pod to put on a test day for members and sponsors to attend and shakedown their cars at. Though limited to 500 people on site, club chariman, Luke Stevenson told us the event was such a success that they are planning a similar pre-season event in 2021. So much preparation went into organising the cars and teams for this perfect opportunity to get lots of track time. Planning from the committee must have felt like a full time job for weeks leading up to it. Drag Days was held behind closed doors, so it was slightly strange to see Santa Pod that empty. Gates…

Favourite issue of PVW? That’s got to be PVW 10/18, when I had the opportunity to feature my Mk4 project, as it’s been something I’ve been wishing about for a while. It gave me the chance to show fellow enthusiasts how far my daily had come and to never give up on your dreams. Worst modded VW you’ve ever seen? I’ll mention no names, but there’s a car in the scene where the owner destroyed a perfectly good car to try and prove a point. Less isn’t always more… Favourite car you’ve been involved with? That’s got to be the Mk1 Cabrio I owned and the Mk2 VR6. I still regret selling them and have never filled the void. Soon there is a surprise coming that will change that I…

If the internal combustion engine is nearing its End of Days, then it’s going out fighting. In a world where 300+ horsepower hot hatches are the norm – each tractable, warrantied and easily pushed further with a remap – it’s easy to see why people might shy away from the delicate balancing act of making an older performance car tick. But embracing that process, component by component, hasn’t just got Martin Barker’s Mk1 Scirocco to the top of its game – it’s kept it there for 20 years. The regular UK show-goers among you will likely have come across some stage of this car’s ongoing evolution since it first hit the scene back in 2000. It’s the product of an engineer’s investigative mind, home to solutions few would come up…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock that specifically excludes interesting and exciting forms of motorsport, you’ll probably be aware of the British Touring Car Championship. It’s a series that eclipses almost anything else, almost globally, for both viewing figures and drama. Its full of crashes, shoves, broken bumpers and angry men in race suits. Power Maxed Racing are a team that have been at the pointy end of the BTCC grid for a numbers of years. With multiple race wins and fastest laps to their name, the team are no stranger to the world of top flight racing. But what makes them unique is the fact that they engineer everything in-house, themselves. They designed and built their cars 100%, lock stock and barrel. But that didn’t happen overnight. I…

Who is Clark Kent? A mild mannered, soft spoken, easy going kinda guy, whose alter ego is a local favourite. Those who know Danny Santos, call him that alter ego, Superman! And this is his story… The car you see here entered the picture in 1993, when his family bought it from a local bodyshop. The 1991 Jetta GLI was one of two parked on the lot, and it was found kind of by accident. At the time, the Jetta was completely stock, but it was an automatic and would serve the family perfectly for what they needed. Danny already had a certain affliction for a local VW Beetle, so falling in love with the family Jetta was pretty much immediate! Fast forward four years, Danny is now 17 and…

There are two pivotal statements that it’s important to consider when conversation turns to this savagely low-slung Mk7. The first of these is its owner’s assertion that “When you’re static, every millimetre is important.” The second is his claim that “There’s not many speedbumps I can’t get over.” The former is a central tenet of the static movement, while the latter frankly sounds rather improbable, although the truth within is testament to just how much effort Martin Mimnagh has put into building this car properly. It’s not enough to simply chase epic lows for the ’Gram, he has to use this Golf every day. The fact that it sits where it does proves that this is a fella who really knows what he’s doing. All of this makes perfect sense,…

To some, this Mk2 Golf needs no introduction. For the uninitiated, this isn’t a feature of just the car pictured here. Rather what it represents. This, the original of the two notorious cars owned by Maurice Reeves, and the story of the supercar-slaying ‘Reeves’ Golfs’. Sadly, Maurice passed away last year, at the grand age of 88, after a lifetime as a petrolhead, leaving behind a twenty-plus year influence on Volkswagen performance. A story I witnessed from the passenger seat and sometimes the driving seat, but those would just be personal recollections. It’s the bigger story his Golfs had on the VW scene and the motivation they generated. How this brainchild Mk2 and sister Mk1 raised the profile and championed extracting unimagined performance from a front-wheel-drive Golf. In the early…

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