THE BIG RESTORATION
James Henderson aimed for perfection when he brought a rare, ultra-early Golf MkI back into the game
cientists tell us that bright yellow is the most easily seen colour of all. You just can’t miss it. James Henderson’s June 1976 Marino Yellow Volkswagen Golf L certainly drew many long looks at last August’s Mk1 Golf Owners’ Club Annual Gathering at Stratford-on-Avon’s racecourse. It won best-in-class for standard-spec cars, and then it won best-in-show. Not surprising, really. It looks like new.
Seldom has a car seemed to escape the ravages of time like this one. Except it didn’t: seven years ago, it was a tired, tatty and reasonably rusty ruin in need of a lot of love. It was also still wearing some of its original silver paint, faded and scabby. So why devote a huge amount of time and effort to such a mundane, sad-looking motor car?
Because it’s a very early one, and very early Golfs are rare and precious jewels in the Volkswagen enthusiast universe. This one is, in fact, a ‘Swallowtail’. How these earliest Golfs got that name is a mystery – there’s no sign of a long, forked appendage at the aft end, after all – but it refers to the shape of the rear panel pressing just below the number plate.
THE RESTORER
James Henderson from Nazeing, Essex is a 31-year-old heating and plumbing engineer, so he’s used to building precision systems in awkward spaces. James caught the Golf bug from his father Mark, who owned a GTI (and a Karmann Ghia). The two of them renovated a MkII Driver together, followed by a couple of later MkIs, too.
The very first Golfs had a very pronounced dip there in the crease line across the rear panel that links the bases of the tail lights, forming a visual frame for the number plate. After a few months of production the corners of the dip were made less abrupt, as in James’
Golf. And by late 1976 the dip had gone altogether, replaced by a straight crease which continued below the tail lights instead of abutting them.
Smooth operator
There’s more early-Golf otherness, too. As well as the Swallowtail, these cars had – cue Americanism – a‘smoothie hood’. In most Golf MkIs there’s a depression in the bonnet that begins just behind the front edge.
On a ‘smoothie hood’, however, the front edge flows into the depression without a downward step.
Other pressings also differ between early and later, and there are myriad subtle differences in trim, fixtures and fittings. All of which means, from the viewpoint of James and his similarly Golf-mad dad Mark, that this has been a story not so much of graft and grinding, shaping, welding and deep craft
