The week after the Volksworld show is full of mixed emotions and feelings. We may feel shattered, and be wishing for a few more hours in bed, but our heads are still buzzing from 48hours of the finest Aircooled VWs ever. Here’s a run down from the biggest weekend in the VW Heritage show calendar.
As headline sponsor we always make sure to put our all into the Volksworld show, and this year was no exception. With 2 stands to run; our ‘traditional’ shop – and a VW Classic Parts display offering some great Genuine VW merchandise, it’s fair to say we had our hands pretty full with pre-show planning!
After last years event, where in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Karmann Ghia we shipped in 3 prototypes, including THE original 1953 car, we definately had some big shoes to fill. Hopefully you felt this years efforts were worthy though, thanks mainly to the loan of the 1937 V30 prototype from the D’Ieteren Gallery in Belgium. This special vehicle, although a replica (none of the original thirty prototypes from ’37 ever survived) clearly caught a lot of attention over the course of the weekend, and rightly so.
Alongside it, was a fantastic ’43 KDF Beetle belonging to the Grundmann Collection which picked up a top twenty award. Another special guest of ours was the white Neretti sports car; designed by Roland D’Ieteren and manufactured in Belgium, it is based on a Type 3 chassis with a pretty eye pleasing fibreglass body ontop; these are few and far between, in fact we’d not heard of them until late last year! Finishing off the collection, was a beautiful Judson ‘charged lowlight Ghia, and of course, our ’56 signwritten pick up.
Over on the mostly minimal VW Heritage stand was ex-team member Tommy Vee’s turbo’d Marathon Beetle (this car used to belong to VWH founder David, before Tom got hold of it). A wall of wheels offered some suitable product eye candy, and 6 of our specialists were on hand all weekend behind our oak topped desks taking special discounted show orders and helping with all enquiries.
We had balloons a plenty for the kids, and gave away a whole load of stickers, and hundereds of flyers for our 30th Birthday meeting at Brands Hatch too.
Whilst orders were being taken and paid for, we were giving away them too! 3 orders were given away each day in our ‘Win your Order’ competition, with 6 lucky customers picking up over £1600 worth of parts between them for free! Congratulations to Marcus Large, Tracey O’Hara, Nigel Butters, Kevin Jackson, Phillip Smart and Ken Mildenhall who were the fortunate ones.
We had the pleasure of placing Bob Beales Rally Beetle on a plinth right outside the show; this amazing vehicle has had a tough, albeit very fun life, but was the perfect way to welcome visitors to Sandown Park, likewise it was the last ‘show car’ they saw on their way home!
Outside on the brickyard was Sarah and Mark from CamperVanatics – Sarah works in our customer services team and when not selling Bratwursts in baguettes she is busy assisting with order queries in our office.. If you missed out, you can taste their wares at our monthly VW Heretics meets.
So what caught our eye?! Although we were there to work, we managed to have a quick wander about before and after the show to take in the cars to. This red Cal-look squareback got a number of our team excited; as did the blue tin top Early Bay parked up on the turntable next door.
Downstairs, I met a chap with a 1 owner from new Panel Van, sadly it was parked up so tightly the public couldn’t see inside, but he gave me a sneek peek. Having been repainted 20 years ago, the inside is perfect – and the cab is still unrestored. We hope to get some more pictures to share with you later in the year.
Anything painted in the harlequin colour scheme brings a smile to my face, so clocking a T5 campervan sporting this amusing hue was fantastic. The watercooled area has been slated a little on social media since the show, but I think it adds a new dimension to the event, and introduces some new trends to the aircooled masses, that perhaps we’ll see filter down (and likewise some aircooled influence for the waterpumpers).
The standard of the vehicles this year was very high, and to pick out just a few seems an injustice, so if you would like to see a whole load of our photos, take a look on our Flickr here. For now, we’ll continue to enjoy the post show excitement and try and channel it into the next events we attend, and our own project cars too!
See you at the next one!
Andy