Innehållsförteckning för May 2023 från Performance VW

Got a product, service or offer you want our readers to know about? Email: pvw.ed@kelsey.co.uk with all the details and we’ll make it happen VW SAVES WÖRTHERSEE WITH ‘GTI COMING HOME’ EVENT With the sad news recently announced of the demise of the official Wörthersee event in Austria, we were extremely pleased to read that Volkswagen AG have stepped in to save the day. Volkswagen is taking the legendary GTI Meeting at Lake Wörthersee into the future: From 2024, it will take place in the heart of the brand, at Wolfsburg, near to the Volkswagen manufacturing plant. The "GTI Coming Home" event will welcome enthusiasts and fans of sporty Volkswagen models from all across Europe. “Our GTI fans are of great importance to Volkswagen," says Imelda Labbé, Member of the…

FROM CONCEPT TO REALITY For many years Audi relied on the reputation of the rally-bred Ur quattro for its sporting image, and had never been short of high-performance V6 and V8 machinery, but heading into the mid Nineties and looking to expand into new niches there was clearly a need for a small sports car. Enter the TT. While much of the mechanical specification could come from the Volkswagen Group, based on the PQ34 platform used for the Mk 4 Golf, Bora and Beetle, as well as the sister A3, its styling would be ground-breaking and a far cry from Audi’s conventional image. A product of the Volkswagen Group Design Center in California in 1994, the exterior styling is credited to American designers J. Mays and Freeman Thomas. The curved…

Adding water to a petrol-fuelled engine may sound like a recipe for disaster, but it’s a practice that’s been going on for over 50 years. The principle behind it is to remove unwanted heat from the combustion process, and therefore aid engine cooling. In a performance engine, a massive amount of heat is produced when the air/fuel mixture combusts. The piston bears the brunt of this heat, and in many standard engines is kept cool by the introduction of the unburnt air/fuel mixture (which itself has a cooling effect) and by conducting the heat through to the underside of the piston, which is constantly quenched by the engine oil (and is why some performance engines have piston-cooling oil jets), and also into the cylinder walls, which are kept cool by…

IN ASSOCIATION WITH As with everything that is modified, you alter one thing and for some reason expect everything else on the car to fit/work out okay around that change. Obviously, that’s very rarely the case and it’s even less likely when you’re in the 11th hour rushing to meet a deadline. Why do we do it to ourselves?! So, with our Ultimate Dubs debut looming, the car finally left the Reflex bodyshop and headed to JTech as a rolling shell. Well, when I say rolling shell, what I mean is, it rolled into the closed trailer on a set of dolly wheels and a trolley jack. If that sounds a bit sketchy, then you haven’t heard the half of it. We hadn’t left them with much time to rebuild…

Image is a fickle thing in the car game. Reputations can be built and destroyed with a single product, re-shaping customer bases and changing expectations overnight. Who could have predicted, 20 years ago, that Porsche would end up being better known for SUVs than sports cars, or that Hyundai would set the bar for hot hatches, or stranger still, that Volkswagen’s most economical model would be a sought-after foundation for some of Europe’s fastest drag cars. No, really. The Lupo 3L wasn’t designed with quarter-mile sprints in mind, but it certainly had the right ingredients. Developed during the early-2000s – the era of money-no-object Volkswagen engineering that also spawned the Phaeton and Golf R32 – it was a structural-level rework of the doe-eyed city car, laser-focused on weight, aerodynamics and…

Through his Gymkhana films and the Hoonigan brand, Ken Block thrust motorsport and modified cars on the masses, but his untimely and tragic passing earlier this year shocked many in the global car community. To celebrate Ken’s legacy and reflect on his immense impact, we asked Hoonigan co-founder and long-time friend, Brian Scotto, what life was like with the OG tyre slayer, and what made him tick. Ken Block was more than a daredevil rally driver and tyre slayer, you see – he was a pioneer, a perfectionist and a visionary who was just as passionate about how well a car performed, as how cool it looked. And when it came to performance, boy, did he have a unique ability to extract the very best from a vehicle; pushing it…

Whether you’re willing to accept it beforehand or not, the cold, hard truth is that developing a project car is usually fraught with as many lows as it is highs. While some will understandably succumb to these hurdles way before their pride and joy has even turned a wheel, others will merely see it as fuel for the fire to get to the finish line and cling onto the rollercoaster until the bitter end. A brief glance at Francisco Medeiros’ turbulent motoring CV is enough to justify him throwing in the towel many years ago, but that’s not his style. Overcoming setbacks, international house moves and even tragic loss along the way, Francisco’s perseverance has left him with one of the cleanest, most capable Mk2 Golfs in Europe right now,…

APRIL 1-2nd DUBSHED Eikon Centre, Lisburn, BT27 5RF www.dubshed.com 15-16th OFFSET SHOW Royal Cornwall Events Centre www.wgnuk.com 15-16th GR8 CAR SHOW Kortrijk Xpo, Belgium www.gr8mag.be 16th ELSECAR AT THE RACES Doncaster Racecourse www.elsecarattheraces.com 16th VAG METTING AZEVEN Fries Congres Centrum, Drahten, Holland www.vagmeeting-azeven.nl 23rd GTI SPRING FEST Santa Pod Raceway www.santapod.co.uk 30th THE DRIVERS COLLECTION Magna Science & Adventure Centre www.thedriverscollection.co.uk 30th STANFORD HALL Stanford Hall, Leicestershire www.stanfordhallvw.com 30th DUSTOFF Thompson Speedway, New England, USA FB: New England Dustoff MAY 1st BHP SHOW Kent Showground www.bhpshows.com 5-7th VANWEST Taunton Racecourse www.vanwest.co.uk 6th MK2 MAYDAY Lebanon, New Jersey, USA www.mk2mayday.com 7th EARLY EDITION Sywell Aerodrome www.edition38.com 7th EUROBUILT SPRING SHOW & SHINE Franklin County Fairgrounds, VT, USA www.eurobuiltvt.com 18-21st TUNING WORLD BODENSEE Messe Friedrichshafen, Germany www.tuningworld.be 19-21st DUBS AT THE LAKE McHenry,…

FROM ONLY £25 T’s & C's: *Booking fee applies. Under 18s must be accompanied by an adult. All attractions are subject to change. Advance public tickets sales close Midnight Friday 8th September 2023. We’re pleased to announce an all-new show for 2023 brought to you by Fast Car Entertainment, the same team that organises the ever-popular TRAX event. The German Car Festival, in partnership with eBay, will be held at the legendary Silverstone circuit and feature, you guessed it, the best German cars around from heavily modified motors right through to bone-stock concours examples. Performance VW, along with sister titles Total BMW and 911 & Porsche World will be media partners for the event and putting on our own displays of past and present feature cars. Our good friends at…

How many of us can say that our earliest experiences of VW ownership were devoid of things that might now make us cringe? I know that for me personally, there are plenty of things I did to my first air-cooled Beetle that make me weep inwardly when I think about that poor car. Trouble was, I came from a family that still sees cars as merely a means of getting from a to b, so the only mentor I had was my great uncle Lawrence, who was into classic British cars. He imparted a lot of his hard-won knowledge to me, but he wasn’t a VW guy. Luckily for Nathan, though, he had a friend and mentor throughout his formative days of searching for his first VW at the tender…

As I sit here looking out the window, the ground is snow covered, summer vehicles are tucked away and Eurobuilt planning for 2023 is under way. Planning looks a little different this year as we build on the success of the Eurobuilt brand, an announcement of this will come at the end of the article, but for now let’s talk about Eurobuilt 2022. Watching the growth of Eurobuilt over the years has been a humbling experience. This growth became extremely evident the day before Eurobuilt 2022 when over 80 cars arrived at the Vermont State Fairgrounds for our annual pre-show cruise through the scenic backroads of Vermont. The cruise ends back at the fairgrounds where participants are treated to an evening of food, shop talk, catching up and laughs. One…

When Birthdays and Christmas approach these days, I find myself intentionally looking at presents that will get my son off of YouTube or his X-Box and into something more creative and tangible. Over the past few years I bought him all the classics; jigsaws, chess sets and, most recently, a 1/10th scale Tamiya R/C assembly kit. I actually bought a Monster Beetle five or six years ago, which was a great challenge to build and so rewarding once complete, however, my son was too young to get involved in that one. Having recently turned 11, I figured picking up another Tamiya kit to build together would be a great way for us to do something creative together and build something that we could also have some fun with when completed.…