Mk1 VW Golf 2.0 litre 16 valve Club Championship Winner

[Redlina]

I've been asked to run a thread on my previous experiences building & racing Mk1 Golfs. By the time this story is told you'll see I raced about a half dozen Mk1's over the years, but the main focus will be relating the building & racing of my last Mk1, which was very successful & fantastic fun to race.

The ode starts with me buying a brand new Mk1 LS (badly built in Australia), as a family car & promising my wife I'd never race it (dumbest vow I ever made!). So here's me in 1976 with my fresh from the dealership car. Check out that moustache... grouse!



And here's me breaking my promise at Amaroo Park hillclimb (now an industrial estate)


VW Australia took the disgusting decision to fit a single throat carburetor instead of fuel injection to the LS because they thought their assembly line workers would struggle with the latter. So the carby sat on a rubber adaptor plate, which tore under race conditions. So my first mod was to make that a solid mount with steel tube . Revolutionary modifications I'm talking here ... hahahaha. I only owned this car for eighteen months, but in that time I won my club's motorkhana championship. The guy watching me here on the day I topped the point score was also running a Mk1 -but he ate my dust that year.


Someone mistakenly allowed our car club to run an event on the Amaroo Park Motocross bike circuit. Here's me getting serious air... the day before I had to commute to work in the poor old thing

[mitch750]

This is epic! keen for more!

[Redlina]

By 1981 I'd read enough car magazine evaluations to know that all the fitment problems with the Australian built LS Golf had been overcome by VW Australia thankfully deciding to import complete cars from the German factory. Passing a car yard commuting to work one day ( er.. I was the one travelling - not the car yard smarty pants), I saw this 1980 GLS import in a dealer's yard. That night I went completely over my first Golf, trying in vain to remove the wear and damage of hard racing, let alone the dust which had gotten into every nook & cranny thanks to the lack of basic sealing thanks to the terrible Ozzie assembly. I still remember the car dealer's horror when my trade-in got the once over, but I had cash to do the deal, and a more luxurious family/commuter/club car was born. This was an absolutely brilliant Golf. Ya gotta love European workmanship!
I added a GTi spoiler, striped it myself, heavy sway bars front & back, and widened rims to get the typical three wheel stance that typified a Mk1 at speed.




I had great fun in this car. My favorite track was Oran Park (now a housing estate), where I could literally drive every corner on three wheels - much to the amazement of the officials (who vainly cautioned me), and that fellow club member in his blue LS. We ran in pairs at this Supersprint, where you take turns as to who leads out. I let the other Golf lead out, then passed him up the inside under brakes into the first corner and chucked it in. He backed off because he thought I was gonna roll. Silly boy... never caught me all day, but we had the crowd on it's feet watching us dice lap after lap inches apart.



When my family of 3 kids just got too big for the back seat of the GLS I reluctantly had to sell it & trade up to something bigger. It would be about seventeen years before my kids all left home, and I found myself divorced but free to get back into car racing after much too long a break - my job as a Baptist minister having prevented me racing on Sundays. My kids & I all moved to Newcastle, where my son quickly discovered a local car club that ran more dirt events than any other group in Australia. He started racing his road car, and I started looking for a Mk1 Golf that this time would just be a dedicated club racer. The fun was about to begin far beyond anything I'd done before.

[fred27]

Thanks for sharing, enjoying this story and pictures

[sports racer]

Great topic. Love the picture of the two Golfs 3 wheeling in tandem.

More please.

Lots more!

[Redlina]

So we fast forward to 1999, and I've joined the local Newcastle MG Car Club. They run hillclimbs and a few dirt events for all makes of cars and, having watched my son at a couple of their dirt events, I can see competition is wide open for a well set up Mk1 Golf. There's actually a guy running an immaculate GLS import he's had from brand new. Everyone in t he family has used it for transport, and now his girls have finished university & moved on he's turned it into a club racer because he can't bear to part with it. We get talking Golfs, and he yells me you can swap a 2.0 litre into them these days. So I come away making serious plans to myself, and literally the next week I find this 1976 Australian built LS running out of road registration advertised in the local rag. I arrange to see the car - know where all the rust spots will be, and knock him down to $250 when I find them. Both inner guards & lower door edges need repairs down the A Pillar, so it's off to the local body shop for repairs.



I get the car registered & back on the road, and drive it to a dirt motorkhana. The car wins it's very first event OUTRIGHT! I cannot believe it, having never been that successful before.



So I decide to get serious, get the contact details of the VW parts importer who brings in the 2.0 litre engines, and find out he only ever brought in one - a Passat front cut... and it's mine by week's end. Out comes the 1.6 SOHC & it's 4 speed gearbox, and in goes the 2.0 litre DOHC 16 valve with mechanical Bosch fuel injection & a 5 speed transmission. It literally bolts straight in, and the new driveshafts and everything else fits like it was made for the Mk1. I now have the only one of these in Australia, and it proves to be a weapon!



Soon I am laying tire smoke, lifting back wheels again, and winning my class every time I race on the dirt, and frequently on the tar as well. Points pile up and I run second outright in the MG Club Championship.




I won this tar motorkhana outright with the 2.0 litre Mk1 Golf. A few weeks later I'm racing at the local hillclimb when an inside wheel clips the apex edging, and up on two wheels I go. The car hangs there for ages, officials telling me PAST forty five degrees. I have time to remember you have to steer towards the wheels which are on the ground at a time like this, jerk the wheel RIGHT, and down she comes unscathed right in front of the gasping crowd. Doing this earns you a certain reputation within your peers!



The next weekend my son & I are sharing a drive of the Golf through the trees on a rally special stage. I watch James hurtle around a corner & see he's going much faster than I did. The very next instant he hits a huge gum tree right next to the track, kinks the roof & writes the car off. My racing plans just hit a problem!

[Water Boy]

Very much enjoying this. Keep the story coming!

[sports racer]

Down here we leave the roadkill on the road.

When you're turning left and on the 2 right wheels about to tip over wouldn't turning sharp left make it worse? I thought turning sharp right would straighten the car and bring the wheels down?

Was the VW parts importer Brian? I remember talking to him years ago about a 16v transplant for my MK1 and he told me about a quick one winning lots of events.

Cheers

Paul

[Redlina]

Hahaha - yes Paul you're absolutely right about which direction to steer when up on two. Although I turned the wheel the correct way on the day, I got it back to front in writing this. Gees ... I hope this doesn't make me responsible for a whole lotta arse overs from tyros following my wrong advice! To avoid that I've gone back & edited that text to correct it to a RIGHT turn. Yes, Brian from Galston Gorge... GTi Motors?? was the person from who I bought the Passat front cut.

Roadkill?? Hey just because I was a successful hunter & professional taxidermist in another life is no grounds for witty snaps. I mean there's even a top You Tube show just for petrol heads like us based on that whole persona now, isn't there? Hahahaha.

[16v_kid]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

[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.