East Bound and Down

Some ideas aren't that great, some are just downright terrible. This one, well, I'll let you judge. I'd gone as far as I reasonably could with the RX7, and one sunny morning, some terrified Children drove over from Paris to take it off my hands, I was VERY sad to see it go and needed something else to waste money on.

 Bye Japanese, you scared me in more ways than you'll ever know.

So, toying with various options I rather took to the idea of playing with another Volkswagging but couldn't get interested in any I saw, then it struck me, as a rapidly balding/ageing chap, what could be more appropriate than a cabriolet, especially that most middle class of them all, the truly awful Mk3.5 avantgarde...

In due course, some beans were exchanged for this soft topped terror

An excellent chap, well into his Cosworth Mercs was punting it on behalf of his Mrs, he described it quite accurately over the phone as "gay as fuck with a ride height to make grown men weep."  It did have a couple of important options though; it was cheap and the roof was electric.

Ok, now what, a conversation our own illegal immigrant Mexican had been having for a while now concerning putting the innards from the hibernating ALL TUV into an Audi came back to me, perhaps I could steal the idea and the glory and resurrect TUV in a top down format.  Ok, all the bits were in line, now all we have to do, is, well, all the rest actually.

Drinking, convoy, trailer, hire, sat nav, speedhumps, jump forward to the arrival at a pile of unlikely looking carparts in darkest Hampshire.

Now, I remember this:

so was anticipating good things from the removal of the magic cover

TA DA!!!

oh right, I like what you've done with it Willard..

So, we'll just drive up the trailer.

Ok, so we won't.  We'll winch it up.

About 2 hours later using the classic "jacking up a jack on a trailer" safety technique we had it half on, but, we needed to unhook the tow car for a second..............

I'm not going to lie, when that happened it nearly took my face clean off which would have put a curiously downbeat edge on the weekend.

Eventually after much cajoling we had the hefty beast up and tied down ready to meet its and possibly our death.

Emotional farewells were said to William and the convoy of Mk3 metal got started

Towing is odd, you can almost forget it's there and then halfway round a corner at 65 and all the sphincters start twitching as the rear end loads up and pulls....

interestingly, the tow car achieved better MPG than either of the VR's in the convoy so this is officially the best way to increase the fuel economy of your VR6.

True to form Mr Top Fuel kept the roof down the whole way, late into the evening and ended the day dressed in gloves, wooly hat under straw hat and ski goggles, respect that man.

We carried on late into the day arriving at Sleepers garage in Cov to be greeted by the smiling owner, (not sure if I'd have been smiling, he's a braver man than I) and started to unload the Vr....

Suddenly an ear splitting scream, we jump round, Feasty, our pet idiot has decided that as the engine only had another 200 yards to live he wanted it to die and a handbrake on trip to the redline was the way forward.  Frantically we flagged him down and the gearbox was destined to live again!

Lets get out of here.

That evening went on well into daylight the next day, ask us about it at the next show, it's a good un.

pictonroad.