Motoring News

Continuing on from the post i wrote about the mk1 Golf estate a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would start a series of posts about cool and amazing projects that I find across the Internet. There are a number of great build threads that I am following across a number of sites, but to start off with I have a project that I found today and just had to share.

The Thread is only 10 pages long and is still running with the car only half finished, but its still well worth a read as the engineering and build quality is second to none. The thread starts like this,

So i was going to swap the VR6 out of my mk3 track car into a mk2 jetta with a clean shell…or so i thought. Turns out that the jetta shell was far from clean, but it was free so i couldn’t complain . I gutted the car to find about an inch of water in the foot wells caused by a pin hole in the sunroof panel and plenty of sitting outside. I started removing the undercoating and got sick of being covered in sticky crap so i pulled out the big guns. I ended up removing the entire floor pan from the front firewall to the license plate tub. Now the fun begins…the plan has changed to create a mid-engined RWD 4 door jetta.

Followed by loads of photos of his little white mk2 Jetta getting cut down and completely stripped. It take the builder no time at all to start building up the space frame to house the driver and passenger and to house the new power unit and all the interior. The car gets a new heavy-duty roll cage and a test fitting of the VRT engine in the back.

Jetta getting the chop

Rear subframe in place, though it wont be used in the end.

The new VR6 engine in place.

I would continue with a full commentary of the whole build, but I am sure you would all prefer reading through and watching the car come to life with some excellent pieces of engineering along the way, including the billet hubs and completely custom suspension setup. Here are some highlights from the thread.

Centre bore mounthed split rims.

The Jetta finally on its wheels with all the spaceframe finished.

The rear suspension setup now looks nothing like the standard setup at all.

The front suspension it unique too, with two shocks dealing with two different plains of movement.

The car is truly amazing and will be a complete beast once finished. I will be watching the thread on Vortex with great interest. All of the photos in this blog have been taken from the Votex forum and have been originally taken by the builder of the car VR6-3.0.

Now for something completely different.

I was wondering through the internet this morning and found something out of the ordinary (A shock for the Internet i know) and felt compelled to share it with you all.

As you may have guessed from the title, what I found was something rather unique and a nice break from the norm. I stumbled across a build thread on the mk1 Golf owners club forum by a very imaginative mk1 Jetta owner that wanted to do something a bit different. What he has done is take a 3dr mk1 Jetta and convert it into a mk1 Golf estate. As you can imagine this has taken quite a bit of chopping and welding, but the end product is very very good indeed.

The thread kicks off with a single tag line and a picture to get people salivating.

“My German buddy is using a Golf rear end to make a 3-door Mk1 Jetta into an estate car. Will be an interesting project”

Gotta mk1 Estate

The thread then develops into a normal build thread with only a few updates on the cars progress through its build. The basic premise of the car is to take a 3dr mk1 Jetta (very rare in the UK as they didn’t import many if at all) and chop the back off to replace it with the back end of a normal mk1 Golf. Because of the longer body of the Jetta this basically leave you with an estate mk1 Golf.

What makes this project even more interesting is chopping and welding such a large panel as the roof is not easy at all and to get a good finish you have to be pretty good with a welder. Here are some more pics of the project in construction.

Rear quarter shot before any welding

Rear wing after welding.

Other side all welded up with some arch work too.

Even just after welding the panels together the car looks great and something very different indeed. The last picture shows how much work must have gone into the welding of the panels as all the welds are done as to try and not warp the panels with the heat of the welder. this means welding in small sections along the panels to stop the heat building up in any one section.

If you thought the car looked effective in the above pics, just look at the car after some retro inspired paint.

Mk1 Gotta with some retro paint.

Another paint shot.

Now, there is a little bit of a split as to those who like this car and those who think it looks (for lack of a better word) fugly. But i think its something different and very cool indeed. I am sure you will make up your own mind as to what you think of the Gotta, but I say, in a scene that seems to be getting a little old and ‘done’, something that breaks the boundaries of what can be done is more then welcome.

Pretty much all of you that use Firefox will know by know, but Firefox has just released a new version of its browser that now lets you customize the look by picking one of over 3000 personas from the mozilla site. Other browsers have been doing this for a long time (Opera for instance) but because of the following Firefox has there are some really rather good personas to choose from.

Here are a couple that might interest some of you motoring mad readers.

• Drifting Subaru STi
• ABT Audi
• Kawasaki Ninja Zx6r
• Shelby GT500 1967
• BMW M3 GT2
• McLaren-Mercedes
• 1971 Dodge Challenger
• Porsche GT3 RS

There are loads more covering every theme you could ever think of so go and have a look. Personas for Firefox.

This weekend i traveled all the way up to Santa Pod Raceway from the South West to attend the Retro Show 2010.

I have been to this show (the only show i go to most years) every year for the last 3 years and once again I was not disappointed with the quality and quantity of retro metal on show. This year I was without a car to go on a stand (i have been up in my Corrado G60 and Passat the last few years) but it still didn’t stop me from having a great time.

This post ties in perfectly with my last post as I got to experience some top fuel dragster action with one of the cars trying a little too hard (see the pic below), even if the were just demoing the cars for us. Once again the best car down the track was Pod’s own rocket car that blew us all way with a 6 second run.

As i mentioned the quality of the cars was great this year, especially those entered for the show and shine, with a wide variety of different models and styles of cars, all very well maintained and finished to a very high standard.

This year, as well as having the normal track action that Santa Pod is well known for they had a retro drift team there with three mk2 Escorts and two early Starlet’s. I was very impressed with the control and speed. I would post up a link to the drift team but i can’t remember who they were, sorry guys.

I have 177 images from the weekend, but here are a couple of my favorite cars from the show.

Drag wheelie

My friend Joe's Capri

Mk1 Astra with a RedTop

Datsun Sunny Slammed on Air

Mint Mk2 Escort

Rat Astra