‘THIS CAR TURNED OUT TO BE OUR NEMESIS’

Fuzz Townshend takes us behind the scenes of the restos on the latest series of Car SOS. This week, a Volkswagen Corrado teaches the team a few lessons

Every now and again a car that should be a straightforward recommissioning and paint job turns into a nightmarish job. In fact, in the case of the Volkswagen Corrado featured in this week’s episode of Car SOS I can comfortably say that this car turned out to be our nemesis.

Many of the problems faced with the car weren’t mentioned within the show because they occurred unexpectedly. The first warning that all was not well with the car came on the day we collected it, when a local repair garage owner popped over and let me know that he’d had a spot of history with it.

‘It wants re-wiring’, he said, bleakly. Naturally I took his assertion with a cynical pinch of salt. However, I should have listened.

Meanwhile Tim, being a huge fan of VW products and car fiddling, promised the nominator a raft of modifications, which set in play the remaining ingredients to create a perfect storm, leading us down a hellish track into disaster.

You see, the warning that

I received turned out to be entirely justified; on removing the driver’s door during the car’s strip-down for body repairs, prep and paint, I found that the door loom had been hard-wired, omitting the quickrelease plug and socket. The car had been having problems due to a wayward immobiliser and central locking system so attempts had been made to bypass the problem. Apparently, this had led to running unreliability and ECU problems.

The engine was known to have blown its cylinder head gasket; an offer of a larger turbocharged engine had been received, complete with modified subframe to allow easy installation. However, I was led to believe that even this engine required a re-build.

It was here where I took the poor decision to re-build the original engine, based on the maxim ‘better the devil you know’, and fit a turbocharger. The resultant poor running couldn’t be solved through ECU reprogramming, nor could we decide on an alternative turbo, and all the time the clock was ticking. The whole task was something akin to getting lost in a vast maze and wasn’t resolved until eventually we adopted the aforementioned larger engine option modification post-filming and with the assistance of some wonderful Corrado fans.

The electrical and other niggles were eventually rectified but not until we’d had the car for a great many weeks and found ourselves red-faced on numerous occasions when we thought we’d solved the problems only for another breakdown to ensue. The car’s body condition? Well, that was actually excellent, barring a rough rat-look paint job, which turned out to be the very least of our worries.

I learned a few extremely valuable lessons with this car, including that it’s not always body condition that dictates the duration of a recommission. And to listen when warned of impending disaster.

Fuzz and Tim managed to transform this Corrado – but not without it causing a string of headaches for the Car SOS experts. The ‘rat look’ paintwork made this Corrado look cosmetically distressed, but Fuzz says that the bodywork was one of the few areas of this resto that didn’t turn out to be nightmare.

Fuzz and his team found themselves lost in a maze of issues during the VW’S stripdown, including replacing an engine whose cylinder head gasket had blown and unreliable electrics.