Car SOS – VW Beetle

Every week in CCW, Fuzz Townshend takes us behind the scenes of the restos on the new series of Car SOS. This week, how he and specialists rescued a rotten Beetle

‘AVolkswagen Beetle was the very first car that Car SOS took on in its first series, so why choose to repeat a car type, I hear you say?

‘The reasons are that, firstly, the car itself presented us with new challenges and some problems hitherto unexperienced due to its customised nature. And secondly, the owner and nominee had been injured in such a way that the act of driving had become problematic for him, meaning that some additional adaptations would be essential.

‘Owner Andreas, whose family had been originators of the legendary VW event, “Run to the Sun”, had been viciously attacked with acid on his own doorstep in a case of mistaken identity and his life had been changed forever in a moment. In addition to painful acid burns and consequent scarring, he also lost sight in his left eye. As a result of this, driving had become more difficult, especially when needing to check action to the nearside of the car.

‘Some marvellous electronic wizardry from Car SOS chum Alec Morris, known to us as “Welsh Q” owing to his ingenious ideas, made the car very much more driveable for someone with Andreas’ injuries. But I’m getting ahead of things here because the car needed a great deal of work before adding electronics into the mix.

‘It may seem as though we’re doing a lot of work in other workshops right now, but we’ve relied on specialist chums for the past few series to take on one of the Car SOS cars, giving viewers and the production team greater insight into far reaching restorations.

‘ With the Beetle Wizard, Lee Southerton and his excellent team of Volkswagen restorers and enthusiasts at VolksMagic in Oldbury leaped at the chance to breathe new life into the beleaguered beachside Bug, despite having the option to walk away from it once it had landed in their workshop.

‘It became apparent very quickly that whoever had undertaken the conversion of the original saloon Beetle to Wizard spec had done so without due regard to safety because opening the doors and lifting them at their trailing edges revealed that the car was hinge-ing at the ‘A’ posts. No strengthening had been added at chassis level when the steel roof section had been removed. Worse still was the fact that the floor sections and sills were rotten, rendering the car an absolute death trap.

‘I set to work cutting away the rotten floors and Lee and his team made short work of letting in new metal all over the car.

‘The Beetle Wizard, being very much a custom car, allowed licence to add trinkets not normally permitted when secretly restoring someone’s pride and joy and so, following a lead from the VolksMagic guys, fellow VW expert, Max Edwards, was called in to supply and fit his excellent, selfdesigned air suspension equipment, allowing oodles of stance attitude when static and excellent driveability over rough showground terrain.

‘Lee designed a pale yellow and battleship grey paint scheme (it really worked) for the car and his team made a superb job of turning the car out, beautifully finished, within the traditionally tight Car SOS timescale.

‘Don’t miss tomorrow’s episode to find out exactly what electrickery was involved in the car’s restoration and see the car’s full transformation from beastly to beauty.’

One of the biggest challenges for Fuzz, Tim and VW restoration guru, Lee Southerton, was replacing the Wizards’ rotten floor and replacing it with new metal where needed. The many new components that Tim Shaw sourced during the Wizard’s tightly-timed restoration was a replacement fuel tank to replace the corroded original.

The final jobs on reviving the Wizard Roadster included a custom paint job and brandnew air suspension, designed by classic Volkswagen expert, Max Edwards.

One of Fuzz’s biggest challenges was sorting out the Wizard’s lack of structural integrity, due to a lack of strengthening when the car was converted from a saloon.