£1000 Challenge

VW Polo

DAVID SIMISTER 'Wow, that takes me back!’ That’s the sort of nostalgia-fuelled outburst that you’d expect to hear when you arrive at a show in a restored Standard 8, or perhaps – and a bit more likely in my case – you’ve told someone that you have the actual, offi cially-endorsed Tracy Island from Thunderbird, Turner-endorsed Blue Peter version.

But it’s not what you want to hear when a tyre fitter has just discovered a VW-specifi c wheel balancer. One that Wolfsburg just so happened to have phased out back in the Midnineties – meaning that at least one of the tyres had been doing its business, unchanged, since the car had rolled out of the showroom.

One thing I’d discovered not long after snapping up our cut-price VW, was that while it handled fairly sweetly in the dry, it was prone to understeer at surprisingly low speeds in the wet. Even though all four tyres still had legal amounts of tread remaining, I decided that the top priority before pressing it into action on any higher-mileage outings should be to treat it to new tyres.

I booked the Polo into Dave’s Tyres and Exhausts in Southport a few days after buying it, and this is where we discovered that while the youngest of JMA’s tyres dated back to 2013, the oldest – the offside rear – had been on there from new. It would have originally worn 145/80 tyres, but with these now few and far between – and priced accordingly – proprietor Dave found that 155/70 Prestivos, while slightly wider, fi tted safely on to our car’s original wheels.

‘It handled sweetly in the dry, but was prone to understeer in the wet’

I took the opportunity to inspect the Polo’s undersides while it was suspended on Dave’s ramp, and was relieved to discover that it seems to have resisted corrosion rather better than its three-wheeled £1k Challenge predecessor. In fact, the only immediate cause for concern was the rather rich smell of petrol that it was putting out at idle, but which cleared up as soon as it ventured higher into the rev range.

Dave reckoned that a tired-looking breather pipe was the most likely culprit, and fabricated a solution to keep the vapour leak at bay for the journey home. As a temporary bodge it did the trick, but it turns out that tyres aren’t going to be the only old rubber that needs replacing on our new runabout.

An hour later and the Polo was back on the move – and with much better road holding, particularly in damp conditions – this time headed back to C’sCPWeterborough offi ces, some three and a half hours away. As soon as it hit the M58, it became obvious that the new tyres had also reduced some of the previous road roar at motorway speeds, but if anything this was a bit of a mixed blessing; it made the wind noise from the ripped driver’s door seal – another job that needs sorting – that little bit more obvious!

But after a fairly easygoing few hours along the M6 and – most entertainingly of all – along the B-roads that lead back to C HCQW, the little Polo emerged from its first big journey with us without so much as a hiccup of complaint. To say that this bodes well for the future is an understatement – though I’ll probably end up regretting having said that…

Better still, it managed to record an impressive 48 miles to the gallon on the journey – meaning that the cost of the entire outing from Southport to Peterborough – that’s a distance of around 160 miles – came in at a smidgeon under £20. Bargain.

Now, that’s something else that takes me back...