Golf Punk’d – Aircooled Mk3 Goof!

If you lived in Brazil in the early '80s, you could have walked into your local VW dealer and bought a Gol, essentially a Mk1 Golf / Passat / Scirocco hybrid with a front-mounted 1300cc Beetle engine. It was built to replace the by then outdated Brasilia in VW do Brazil's line-up and, in principal at least, was a good idea. The monocoque design included all the modern safety features of the time but, befitting of a 1970's VW product, was woefully underpowered. We've only ever seen one of these oddities for real and can tell you, if nothing else, it draws a crowd and some very interesting, if ill-informed, comments.
Which is pretty much exactly what happened when Matt Balls, and the gang of merry makers that go by the name of T3D, rolled into the Players event at North Weald in Essex last September. The fact that they had two slammed, white, air-cooled VWs with stingers rolling on detailed 17-inch Fuchs made the crowds turn and stare, but that was nothing to what happened when Matt opened the bonnet.
Visitors to the VolksWorld Show this year will already have had the chance to see Matt's radical ride for real, and to say it caused a stir there would be a massive understatement. I myself have lamented in the past the lack of custom VWs being built these days and the seeming inability of people to look outside of the already well-defined boxes, but this car answers all those criticisms, and more. The difference today, however, to how things were on show fields in the '90s is that the wildest custom VWs aren't necessarily the cars that shout the loudest. Rather, they tend to be the cars you don't spot straight away, yet something draws someone in for a closer look and then news spreads like wildfire. Matt's Golf is definitely one of those. If you walked past it at the show thinking it was just another lowered Golf, you missed out on one of the most refreshing and challenging cars to yet hit the British VW scene. Matt: "I've wanted to build this car for a long time. I wanted to do it to my old Passat estate, but when they invited us to take the Kerbsnake (T3D's slammed 'n' rimmed Brasilia) to the Players show I thought that was the perfect opportunity to do a water-cooled car but give it our flair, show them how a water-cooled car should sit."

For the full story on this car make sure you pick up a copy of the July 2010 issue of VolksWorld

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