The Driver
Before the arrival of the venerable Golf in 1974, Volkswagen was selling its cute but (let’s be honest) wildly out-of-date Beetle, a contraption invented for the masses in 1938. The minimal Bug remains attractive as a quirky classic car but was well past it in the 1970s. Other VW offerings such as the woeful Type 3, pug-ugly 411 and square K70 look cool only if driven by hipster surfers. In California. Even though the Beetle was a best-seller in earlier years, with a total of 23million flogged to misguided Americans in thrall to Flower Power, Volkswagen was in serious trouble and needed to up its game.
Urban myth has it that a couple of VW suits attended the Turin motor show in the early 1970s and noted the crisp ‘folded paper’ designs by a very un-German fellow named Giorgetto Giugiaro. The gifted Italian landed the job of designing the new Volkswagen, named the Golf after Golfstrom – VW named cars after winds such as Scirocco except, in the US, where the Golf was badged a Rabbit. Go figure… The Golf was the right car at the right time with the right looks and became an instant best-seller. So far, 37million have been screwed together, besting the dear old Bug.
Like many of you, I’m sure, we always had a Golf in the family. Our lethargic BMW was replaced by a snappy Golf GTS, a sort of cut-price GTI. It had a carb-fed 1588cc engine mustering about 80bhp, so it wasn’t particularly fast. But being light, and with its front-wheel-drive layout and wide tyres, it could be driven flat-out everywhere. Don’t forget, at the time, the roads were full of crumbling Beetles, lumbering Peugeot 404s, stodgy Cortinas and asthmatic Morris Marinas.
A few years later the white GTS was replaced with a proper 1800 Golf GTI. In silver with tweed trim inserts, that attractive GTI steering wheel and close-ratio five-speed ’box, the 110bhp hot hatch was the absolute dogs’. Like a better Mini Cooper S or Lancia Fulvia HF, the GTI could be chucked into any corner at any speed and it would romp through. It proved to be tough and was beautifully made; the only shortcoming was the brakes on right-hand-drive models. VW didn’t relocate the brake master cylinder over to the right but left it in-situ and employed a transverse rod to link it to the b
