My Polo history started in 1999 when I'd learnt to drive in this, back when 6Ns were a bit too new to be rusty with knackered gearboxes…
…but it wasn’t my car, and once I’d passed my test at 18 sharing a car with your Mum is NOT cool. I’d been looking for a Mk2 breadvan, but the local ones were all 1 litre; expensive; knackered; or all three. Whilst on holiday on the Isle of Wight the old man spotted a Mk3 1.3CL in the classifieds bit of the local paper – part-ex to clear at a Shitroen dealer.
Looked like this once I’d added a set of 13”x6” BBS RAs and fitted a Mk2 Golf CL front splitter:
It stayed that way for a while, ‘til I got bored of the 55 lame horses and threw a Polo GT (3F) injection system on it in the mistaken belief that it’d turn it into a fast car. It didn’t. With my first year at uni to deal with I had some serious liver-bashing to do, so didn’t worry about the Polo too much ‘til I got a summer job.
With a bit of cash in my pocket from the job, it was time for a G40 conversion:
Yoof (when he really was a Yoof) giving me a helping hand:
It stayed that way for a while, ‘til I put a chip and pulley on it at a rolling road day and melted a piston on the way home. Eventually it got a 1341cc rebuild done at PSD. I bought lots of goodies along the way, and played with nitrous on a 3F lump whilst the PY was being rebuilt. Once the PY was done, we whacked a 100bhp shot of gas on the 3F as a last hurrah and melted the rings to the pistons - then drove it home.
The destruction continued – the PY lump killed numerous gearboxes, including diffs...
....and 5th gear sets...
...so in my final year at uni I bought a Mk2 Coupe S that was cheaper than a replacement G40 'box. Got fed up with the lack of power quickly, so flogged it and bought a G40 ‘box. The sills were fibreglass anyway!
Drove it to Belgium for VW Mania 2005:
Video of it chasing a Boxster S (38m:42s) abroad here - unfortunately the camera car only had an AFH in it so couldn't keep up:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8227698405759365404Experimented with 'alternative' fuels:
And generally all was good. I then got my first job after graduating in summer 2005, and started adding more and more tuning goodies to the G40'd motor. This meant lots of grunt, but peak power at high rpm. The lader used to get frequent rebuilds, and it was during one of these that this happened:
A slut lader was built with a scroll that consisted mainly of JB weld, but it made shit boost and I decided to look elsewhere for power. So at the end of 2006 in the back garden I started a K03 turbo conversion.
At the time it'd become a popular conversion in Germany, but no-one else had used a K03 in the UK. Rumour suggested that Jabbasport had tried it some years previous, and had declared it a crock of shit. However, John Marchant was putting one on his long-term Mk1 G40 turbo project and Steve Pitt of Pitstop Developments was interested in developing a G40 turbo kit using his ‘tin-can’ G40, mine and John’s cars. Spurred on by the turbo'ing success of Mark Hunter several years previous and others giving it a go, I bought a cheapo K03 and got stuck in.
By now everyone knows you have to fit a 6psi boost switch and Newman 'turbo' cam to get a K03 running nicely - but back then that was new ground. I got the car driving with a PY camshaft and it was crap, so switched to a 3F item used by the Germans as a poor man's turbo cam. It too was crap.
However, t'internet suggested that ze Germans were using Schrick 268° cams intended for the Polo GT to good effect with the K03. After a chat with Steve Pitt, he’d found the same with the 3F cam – so by the time I drove the car down for mapping he’d had a couple of Newman cams made up. One went in John’s car, the other in mine.
With it mapped and running 15psi of boost it was time to hit the strip again:
Had a go at Shakespeare County as well as the Pod:
The best I managed was a 14.0s at 99mph. With Duncan (another Pod regular with a G60’d G40) also hitting 14.0s I decided to up my game – more boost was required, which seemed like a good excuse to bolt on an Emerald ECU as I didn’t have Digifant mapping gear at the time:
Miraculously, it started first time:
That takes it up to the beginning of 2008, where other things started to get in the way of pissing around with Polos. It stayed on the road over the next few years (just!) and got used whenever I could – had an outing to the Pod where I managed a 13.6s 1/4 mile in 2010, only a couple of years late! (Pic shows it at the Pod in 2011, but it's got tyre smoke in it so looks cooler...)
Two changes of job and two house moves later it was time to prepare to give it some loving! New gaff came with a decent garage – this pic was after gallons of weedkiller and some serious mowing of weeds:
This is what 17 tonnes of gravel looks like:
BTW – gravel is shite for driveways, but it is cheap and tidied things up nicely to keep the missus happy:
So time to get inside the garage, and turn this:
…into this:
Got distracted by the 2011 CP RR day:
And by the 2011 CP trackday:
