GT’S NEXT YELLOW BEETLE RACER BUILD STARTS

AFTER SELLING HIS OLD VW BEETLE RACER, GLENN TORRENS GETS STUCK INTO BUILDING A BETTER BALLISTIC BUG

REGULAR READERS might reca ll t hat recent ly I sold my bright yellow V W Beetle track car. Built in t he back yard around 12 years ago, over t he follow ing decade I happily raced it in hill climbs, a long t he way developing and upgrading it to be quite successf ul, wit h a couple of t hirds and seconds (but never a f irst, dammit!) in t he under 2-litre class in t he NSW and Austra lian Hill Climb championships.

I happily towed my Bug to other events, too, such as t he terrif ic Leyburn Sprints in Qld and Geelong Sprints in Vic. I was a sta rter in t he f irst-ever Twilight Tarmac Rallysprint Championship at Sydney Drag way and just for f un, attended a couple of Snow y Mountains 1000 airport sprints.

I a lso shocked plent y of Falco-dore drivers down the quarter-mile on Wednesday ‘test and tune’ nights, a lso at Sydney Drag way. And sometimes I even drove it to the pub!

My budget-built Bug was a hell of a lot of f un!

So why sell a well-sorted and successf ul weekend racer? Put simply, the car was as good as it ever could be, and I wanted

to step-up to t he better performance (I hope !) of a later-model V W Super Beetle.

Debuted in 1971, the Super Beet le has a tota lly dif ferent front suspension and steering design to prev ious Bugs. The older cars have a spindly torsion-bar tra iling arm front suspension that a llows considerable f lex during hard cornering… this upsets t he t y re contact patch and hence t he car’s ultimate grip. The Super Beet le has a coil str ut t y pe front suspension that – among ot her t hings – keeps t he t y re better pressed against t he road for higher cornering grip.

The Super I bought is a neglected old road car but once rebuilt, it will be a good look ing and fast weekend fun machine. I’m keen to

“AS BEFORE, MY NEW RACER WILL BE PAINTED A PUNCHY YELLOW”

make my new car a little more road-able than the old one so I may insta ll a fourpoint protection cage (or a si x-point wit h detachable front members) rather than the awkward welded-in si x-point monkey bars of t he prev ious racer.

I retained my 8000rpm t win-Weber 1916cc engine and modified close-ratio gearbox from the old car and, as before, my new racer will be painted a punchy yellow.

So far, my only work has been to strip t he car naked, think about a few things and patch some rust but I hope to spend some time working on it during t he f irst half of 2019. I would love to have my new racer ready for the 2019 Austra lian Hill Climb Championships at the iconic and challenging Mount Panorama… Stay tuned!

RIGHT This is my 200km/h salt-lake car, not my old hill-climb car… but with the rounded front windscreen. My new hill-climb car will be this car’s twin

01 1970s Beetles have a horrible habit of rusting adjacent to the back window. An old engine lid provides perfect patch panels02 Another known Bug rust patch is above the doors. I cut a section from another shell to fix this

03 Yep – more rust! The later model Super Beetles suffer rust behind the dashboard… now fixed! Thumbs-up!

01 With most of the rust patched, I began the onerous task of paint-stripping the rolling shell

03 I plan to use these classic Globe Bathurst wheels. I mocked-up on another Bug to determine wheel offsets and steering geometry

02 The new car’s strut type front suspension will provide good handling. Those wheelwell patches tell of another Beetle rust area