Remembering the Single Life

A Little Bit of History

A long time ago when I was single and the phrase “you spend more on your car than you do on me” had never fallen on my ears, I used to restore Volkswagen Mk2 Sciroccos and Corrados. The Corrado was actually the Scirroco Mk3, there are early prototype pictures (which I used to have but have been mislaid with the passing of time) with the Scirocco badge on. However, the modernisation of the Mk2 to include electric mirrors, electric sunroof, electric windows, electric active spoiler, central locking and all-round mechanical improvements, moved the pricepoint so far up that VW rebranded the Mk3 as the Corrado and continued the Mk2.

With the dramatic downturn in the early 1990s for the Sports Car market (rapidly rising petrol costs and inflation), production of both cars ceased prematurely together in 1995. The car market had become flooded with small, functional fuel efficient vehicles, there was no longer any place for the “sports car for the masses” as VW had initially marketed the Scirocco as. If you wanted a sportscar you must already be rich, and it would be embarassing to see the VW badge on the back anyway; Volkswagen literally means ‘car for the common people’ created by Mr Porsche who created Porsche for the propertied classes.

The Scirocco Mk2 had been a great hit in Germany and it remained a Mk2 trim and technology anomaly within the VW range, whereas the Golf and Passats which had something of a shared ancestry, were evolving technology and trim wise. Getting into a late L-reg Scirocco and an L-reg Golf, you would have been struck by the utter ancient nature of the Scirocco instruments when compared to those of the Golf and Passat. Of particular interest was the Scirocco 16V, much rarer than the Golf GTI 16V. Only available for a single year in the UK market (I think 1983/4), only 6 were ever imported and converted to RHD vehicles by a third party, not VW.

The Scirocco name made a comeback in 2008 but its rebirth was not particularly well received within the Mk2 clubs, but it has grudgingly become part of the patchwork as the Mk2 gets increasingly rare. I did see an ‘official’ meet with some Mk2s a few years back at Chester services, the last one I attended with my last Mk2 was 2007, I lost touch with the club around about the same time but it is still going strong it seems after a lean few years, https://sciroccoregister.co.uk/ . There is also a Corrado club, formed after production had ceased, https://corradoclubgb.co.uk/ and a Corrado forum, https://the-corrado.net/ though the forum seems to be dying, but the site does seem to have links to local clubs.

The Cars

This is an ‘X’ reg, very early Mk2 GTI – the interior was a wild, designer pattern, the carpet was thick and fluffy, the front headlights were of an intermediate design, being the same size (a year later they settled into a new style interior and the classic Mk2 headlights). It was also distinctive because it had the early, 1.6 mechanical fuel injected engine (DX engine code), which had a huge torque hump in the middle giving it that outrageous 1980s acceleration and terrible fuel economy (you might manage 30mpg on a good day!). When I got it, it needed a lot of attention to the bodywork and a lot of TLC. I replaced the steel wheels with some snowflake alloys from a Scala that went to the great scrappie in the sky, and it went back to the guy I bought it from when I had to raise some cash to work and study at the same time. He was one of the founders of the Scirocco Register and he and the co-founder had just moved from a backstreet garage to a huge barn in a farm with lots of cars in various states of repair! Behind the GTI was my carb-Scala model, which was the ‘designer’ model of the range (there was the DX-injection variant also, I had owned a couple of those but have no pics), with a great interior – the ‘proper’ Scalas had white/red seats with a dot pattern, rear lights with white paint highlights in the grooves and the snowflake alloys, which still look great today. Anybody who was somebody would uprate the notoriously temperamental Pierburg standard carbs to Weber ones to give great performance, I once shocked one of my brothers who had given me a lift to collect one in his TT, as I screamed off down the road.

This is the only remaining picture I have of my blue A reg GTI, with the uprated 1.8DX, which gave a respectable 118HP and could give you 40mpg on the motorway, both very impressive for the time. It had the classic ‘bottle cap’ alloys! The car behind was actually a Storm model (1984) which had the full leather interior but had been resprayed by a previous owner to a silver Grey. The special edition Storms (250 each of a Storm Grey and a Brown model) seldom had the same spec as the brochure which promised electrics all round (rather like the Corrado) but it did have a great leather interior and sometimes the Voltmeter in the dash (mostly found on the GTX’s that replaced the GTIs from 1984 on). The GTIs did not have the uprated body kit with the side-skirts which became standard on all models after being first included on the Storms of 1984. The GTI with the skirts became the GTX which also had some great stripey interiors!

I remember the car particularly well because on the night I bought it, the oil pump failed a few miles from home after driving it 90 miles and destroyed the engine. I had to get a donor car, which was a Brown Storm, and swap the engines. For the most strange of reasons, I should have kept the Storm but let the garage keep it, who sold it for a tasty sum! At the time, I thought the GTI was cooler!!

Now this is a thing of beauty, an imported LHD 16V from Freidrichshafen in South Germany (on the Bodensee). This was mechanically the most sophisticated of the Mk2s with an enormous output at the time of 139BHP, giving it a top speed of 131 mph, with an uprated suspension and a nice cloth interior. Driving it back was fun – I had never driven in Europe before and had never driven LHD before! I still remember nearly mowing down a cyclist and nearly causing a crash pulling out of a petrol station. It was a Germany-only model, with a unique colour code and proper air conditioning. This I should never have parted with, but it paid for a year’s university tuition which was more important at the time. The guy who I sold it to did a nice job, swapping the alloys but was made redundant and had to sell it, a German bought it and repatriated it!

Now this is probably the ultimate, and my final MK2 project – the Rieger Scirocco, an outrageous body kit on a Mk2, only 35 were converted I think worldwide. I found this in bits in a shed behind a dealership in Munich, it had originally been a 16V but some “dodgy Turks” (quoting the Germans) had swapped the engine prior to delivering it to the dealership with a 1.3 and it had been left to die. I got it transported to the garage in Freidrichshafen that I had bought the 16V from, drove a donor GTX over, and got the dealership to rebuild the car. They made the car road legal (sort of) for me to drive it out of Germany (it would have been impounded if you had driven it in the condition it was in Germany!) and I got it resprayed and refitted the entire interior with a late GTII, and the dash voltmeter from a GTI. I had a detailed record of the restoration, but seem to have lost it.

I found a Stanley knife underneath the carpet, when I pulled the old carpet out, it was obviously someone’s project that they had lost interest in and they had just botched it to sell it. After taking a couple of years to finally get it completed, I gave it to a friend that at the time needed some encouragement that God was good. He sold it on to a local enthusiast but it has been glimpsed occasionally on the road for a couple of years after (as you cannot miss it!). The wheels were enormous – apparently the rear wheels were only found on one Lotus, and I had to get the tyres direct from Yokohama, at £200 a pop!

In these pics you see the before and after, with the export plate and the British registration. The kit was completely impractical, you scraped every hump, had real problems getting into multistorey car parks but it sure was a cool and fun car.

Now it was natural to move onto Corrados, and I managed to coexist with both models for a bit, often having a Scirocco and a Corrado in the stall at the same time. These were two VR6s I had which were both awesome cars, the first was the white one. The body was in pristine condition but the owner had tried to overhaul the engine at 100K and did not realise that you could not take the block apart and redo the valve springs “cold”, you had to have everything “hot” so that the expansion would allow you to re-seat the valves properly. In doing it cold, he had damaged one of the guides and it consumed a lot of oil. I never got it sorted but the guy who I gave it to, did at substantial cost and also resprayed it black and put a vent in the bonnet to make it look like a turbo. It has now gone to the great scrappy in the sky…

The Green one lasted a long time in my ownership after I bought it at an enormous discount, it had been only used for moving rubbish to a dump as a second car for a few years so you can imagine what a mess it was. However, somehow it had passed the MOT just needing wipers so he could sell it, and I paid only £800 for it which was at least 50% off the asking prices then – the same car today would pull £5K minimum! The seller had tried to open the sunroof to dry it out for selling and it broke as he did, so I picked it up with a broken roof in the rain and the car minging badly of rubbish. The heater/blower was also not working on anything other than maximum setting, so it was a fun few hundred miles home! It survived until I remarried and it was then my wife made it clear it was her or the car, it had racked up 200K and I had needed to replace everything – sensors, lamba, regulators, injectors trying to nail down a problem with losing power and misfiring. None of the garages had thought “fuel pump” so I had incrementally changed everything myself, spending lots and upsetting the marital balance and harmony.

Eventually I decided to put my wife first, and a Polish guy in Milton Keynes bought it as a toy. On the journey down it ran almost perfect, just juddering once as the pump malfunctioned (I only realised it was the pump after I had sold it) but the radiator came loose and fell onto the block…it was time for it to pass on. The picture on that middle-class street is the last time I saw the car as I dropped it off! It is no longer registered, so it looks like the new owner never finished the project. It had a straight through exhaust, enhanced induction, sounded amazing and I had done 160mph in it, and it wanted to go faster still. I had customised the sound system, fitted some nice speakers in a strengthened parcel shelf and replaced the standard speakers with high performance ones, it really did sound good with six in-phase speakers (I was a sound engineer in a previous life)!