Super Sexy Samba

Walk through a Somerset cider orchard at sundown and you can taste the air, the grass curls up to meet your ankles and you couldn't be further from the manufactured fizzy apple-flavoured water that pours from labelled bottles in a thousand bars throughout the land. Getting back to the roots of a process reminds you of how things should be done in this age of over production and analysed perfection.
Talking to Jerome Timbrell in Taunton reminds  us of this. His Samba was born from the desire to have a Van - nothing more, nothing less. That desire started out more than 20 years ago - as soon as Jerome had started to drive, in fact.
"I had a choice between an RX7, XR3i and a Beetle. My sister went to RTTS and brought back some pictures of a Beetle and the next day somebody crashed an XR3i."
So Jerome went out and bought a copy of VolksWorld, which he thinks would have been issue 3 or 4, and this very magazine soon became what he calls "the bane of my wife's life". Sorry about that, Mrs T.
Jerome's dad had a bodyshop at the time, which is why that Beetle became a Wizard Roadster when Jerome was just 17. That's still in the garage to this day, but Jerome was actually driving around in a T25 when he met Catherine, who later became his wife, and when they had a son, a T4 Van was bought and converted for Camper duties.
But as Jerome says, "You never really chilled out in it, because it drove like a Van... You could overtake, so you did."
So he needed to get back to his roots, and taking time to think this over he came to a logical conclusion: "Get back to a traditional bit of fun," adding, "I'd never had a Split or a Bay before, but a couple of friends had. So we sold the T4 with the intention of buying a T25 for a couple of grand and treat it like dog dirt - run it into the ground and let it die."

For the full story check out the October 2008 issue of VolksWorld magazine. On sale on 05 September and then available through back issues.

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