I was after a BMW, actually.
Friday evening with my girlfriend, scrolling through my phone while she was upstairs, I spotted an E24 6 Series on Retroshite. One of my all-time favourites. At £6.35 a ticket, I thought I’d have a couple. Then I noticed a Mk1 Golf Cabriolet at £3.50 a go and bought two tickets for that as well, to bring it to around twenty quid.
I like to buy a couple of tickets now and then. I look at it as paying for a weekend daydream. You get a few days of wondering where you’d park it, where you’d take it and what you’d do with it, then the draw happens, somebody else wins and you get on with your life.
Only this time, somebody else didn’t win.
It was about nine on Sunday evening. I was at home, watching something irrelevant on YouTube, when an email notification appeared from Retroshite. “Congratulations!”
Here we go, I thought. I’ve won a free entry for next time.
But no. There it was, straightforward and without much ceremony. I’d won the Golf.
Just as my heart started getting involved, my brain decided it must be a fake. I went to the website. There was my username against the winning entry. While I was still trying to absorb that, my phone pinged.
“Hi Darren, you won the VW Golf Cabriolet on Retroshite! Can you confirm your postcode is … and what is your availability for delivery this week? Cheers.”
I was still establishing whether this was real. They were working out when to deliver it.
I sent my girlfriend the link to the results page. Her reply was along the lines of “OMG!!”
Quite.
Better and worse
Delivery was arranged for either Wednesday or Friday. At about three on Wednesday afternoon, an unfamiliar number rang. Retroshite are based in Scotland, and between the driver’s impressively thick accent and a poor phone signal, I understood very little beyond “four thirty”.
That seemed to be the important bit.
My brother spotted it arriving. The driver parked a little further down the road and we walked up for our first proper look at my seven-quid Golf.
In some ways it was better than I’d hoped. In others, considerably worse.
We’d both studied the photographs and watched the short video. My brother reckoned the paint could probably be brought round with some work. Standing beside it, we immediately abandoned that idea. It was cracked and crazed to the point where sorting it properly would mean stripping it right back.
The paint seems to tell several different stories at once. One side still wears what looks like its original blue, now faded and cracked with age. The rear and one rear quarter have been aerosol-painted in roughly the right shade, but the paint has reacted badly. Then somebody appears to have started again from the front in an entirely different blue, doing the nose, wings and doors before apparently losing interest.
Oddly, the rest of the car tells a rather different story.
The Pirelli P-Slots have been freshly refurbished and are virtually unmarked. It has a matching set of fairly new Uniroyal tyres too, which I always take as a good sign. They’re tyres made by a company I’ve actually heard of. Somebody wasn't simply buying the cheapest four black circles that would get it through an MOT.
The exhaust looks recent, as does the Weber carburettor, and somebody has fitted the important half of a replacement hood - the bit that actually stops the rain coming in.
It doesn’t feel like a car that nobody cared about. More like one that several people have cared about at different times, each with a different idea of what to do next.
More importantly, it started promptly and sounded great coming off the trailer. No ominous noises. The lowered suspension made it sit just right, the shell seemed solid and it didn’t smell mouldy or damp inside.
Anyone who has bought an old car will understand the importance of that last point.
The original plan was simple enough. Enjoy it over the summer, sort a few things and sell it on as an autumn or winter project for somebody willing to tackle the paint.
An old school friend
Earlier in the year I’d sold my Mk1 Golf GTI Campaign after around 23 years. Now, unexpectedly, another Mk1 was sitting outside.
I had to wait before driving it, while I sorted the insurance and tax. Waiting until the start of the following month saved a few quid. Every penny counts when the car cost £7.
I have a local route I’ve used with every car I buy. Four or five miles of country lanes, faster stretches and broken surfaces, enough of a mixture to start getting a feel for things.
The Cabrio felt like meeting an old friend from school who has changed so much that you have to look carefully, but underneath you can still recognise the features you remember.
There are subtle differences to the cabin when compared with the Campaign. Different steering wheel, seats and door cappings, less exposed metal. Yet the doors make exactly the same noise when you shut them, despite most of the window frames having disappeared.
It has just as many rattles and creaks. They’re different ones.
The gearchange has the same familiar reluctance at times, although remembering to use a choke has taken some adjustment after the GTI’s K-Jetronic injection.
The steering is much lighter, but it tramlines and doesn’t self-centre as strongly. I suspect being quite so low has done the suspension geometry few favours.
It does look good sat low, though.
Almost to Santa Pod
The first hint of trouble came when I took a mate out one evening. Accelerating up through the gears on a back road, it began to hesitate and fluff in third just as I was about to reach for fourth.
I didn’t think too much of it.
The first proper test was a trip to Santa Pod for a round of the VWDRC championships. About 150 miles, with all my camping gear aboard. I decided against the motorways and put a four-hour back-road route into the sat nav.
It was a scorching day. Every now and then the Golf would hesitate, then recover. As the journey went on, the hesitation became more frequent and more determined.
By the A50 it was getting too much. I turned off and eventually found a lay-by just outside Loughborough. Fuel starvation seemed possible, or perhaps something electrical was objecting to the heat.
Cooling it down didn’t help. I called the AA.
Fortunately, I had brought accommodation and furniture. I unfolded my camping chair, found a spot under a tree and sat down.
I wasn’t particularly bothered. If it went home on a recovery truck, I could take the E39 the following morning and still get to Santa Pod before anything happened.
The AA chap was an older bloke who could have retired years ago, but enjoyed the job too much. He knew his old cars and immediately suspected fuel starvation.
He rerouted fuel lines, bypassed the Malpassi regulator and tried a few other things, testing each adjustment with a vigorous run up and down the road. The one thing he was sure of was that there wasn’t as much fuel reaching the carburettor as he’d expect.
Whatever was causing it, he couldn’t sort it at the roadside.
Home it went.
I left again at half past five the next morning in the BMW and was at Santa Pod before the track opened at nine.
A small piece of brake pipe
Back home, my brother and I started investigating.
The distributor cap looked tired and the rotor arm was past its best, so a service seemed a sensible starting point. New cap, rotor arm and plugs made it run noticeably better, but it still wouldn’t hold more than about 50mph for much beyond a hundred yards.
I cleaned the carburettor jets. No improvement.
Eventually we looked at the fuel pressure. The car had acquired a Weber carburettor and an electric pump, and a mate had seen similar problems with modified fuel systems on competition cars.
The return line was allowing too much fuel back to the tank, leaving too little to keep the carburettor supplied under sustained demand.
The solution involved a few inches of metal brake pipe. We crushed the middle down to form a restriction and fitted it into the return line.
Instant cure.
I tried it gently first, waiting for the familiar stutter. Nothing. After ten minutes I headed for the dual carriageway.
It accelerated cleanly and held speed without faltering. That was enough. I knew it was fixed.
After all the servicing, cleaning and speculation, a squashed bit of pipe had done it.
A couple of months later, I finally gave it another chance.
National Finals weekend at Santa Pod meant a round trip of about 350 miles. This time I took the Golf. It sat at around 60mph for mile after mile, roof down when the weather allowed, camping gear piled into the back.
It didn’t miss a beat.
I stopped for a photograph beneath the Santa Pod sign on the way in. After the previous attempt had ended in a lay-by outside Loughborough, that felt worth recording.
What the roof is for
One scorching Saturday evening in August, my girlfriend and I went out with her son and his wife in the back.
I’d bought a big Bluetooth speaker, which we had with us. Roof down, eighties songs playing, all four of us singing at the tops of our voices. Wind in our hair, exhaust barking away, huge grins all round.
People looked as we went past, although they do that even when there aren’t four people murdering the soundtrack of my youth.
The Golf gets attention everywhere, and it’s always positive. Park at Tesco early in the morning and the bloke sorting the trolleys will come over for a word. Someone interrupted my gym routine to tell me how cool it was and how much he loved the patina. People shout across at crossings. Taxi drivers wind their windows down. People wave.
I find it slightly baffling. I know they’re getting rare, and it’s hardly silent, but it’s still a small, dark wedge of a car. The amount of goodwill it generates is extraordinary.
I drive it like I would if I was still a teenager too, which doesn’t help, I suppose.
It’s staying
I should have known I was keeping it when I started designing it a keyring.
Making keyrings is my living, so that probably needs explaining. The Summer Sun design wasn’t conceived as another product. I’d got attached to the Golf and wanted to make something for it. Somewhere in the process, the scruffy Cabrio I was going to move on in autumn had become my car.
It’ll probably grow into a range eventually. T-shirts too. But that came afterwards. The first one was for me.
I’d been half thinking about a second car to supplement the E39 for a while, without settling on anything or having the budget to do much about it. The Cabrio turns out to be perfect. Completely different from the BMW, but familiar enough that I don’t feel out of my depth.
It’s familiar. It’s scruffy. I can park it without worrying that somebody might add a mark to otherwise immaculate paintwork.
More than that, I can mess about with it.
The Campaign had reached the point where everything had to be clean, correct and original, with proper receipts for proper expensive parts. I enjoyed that car for a very long time, but this Golf gives me a freedom I hadn’t realised I missed.
It reminds me of back when I was eighteen and spending my life tinkering with Minis. I had quite a few of those. Back then, ordinary cars wore mismatched doors, bitumen tidemarks and replacement wings whose paint was still a future ambition. You saw them everywhere.
The Cabrio takes me back to that world. It has well-worn paint and things to improve, but I can enjoy driving it while I decide what to do next.
I’ve been given a single-headlamp Mk1 grille with a chrome surround, which should look much better than the aftermarket badgeless one it currently wears. I’m tempted by some stripes. Occasionally I start mentally assembling a period nineties stereo installation, before remembering that worrying about somebody stealing it would spoil some of the appeal.
The Bluetooth speaker is doing a decent enough job.
And the E24 I originally wanted? I’d still stop and admire one. They’re superb-looking things, and remain among my favourite cars. But there isn’t really room for one on the driveway, the E39 already supplies plenty of waft and I’d be dealing with real repair bills using real money.
Given the choice now, I’d take the Golf.
I paid £7 for a weekend daydream.
I’m keeping it.