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The original air-cooled VW Beetle had proved to be the perfect starting point for a variety of different automotive adventures. Throughout the 1960s Beetles were raced on road courses, on drag strips, and in the deserts. The simple yet rugged Beetle engine was capable of producing significant horsepower if carefully modified, and a whole tuning industry grew up to get more from the humble Beetle.

But VW owners were interested in more than just performance. They customized and sculpted their cars into shapes never envisioned by Ferdinand Porsche when he penned the original rounded form in the 1930s. Bug-ins were organized in every part of the country, as owners wanted to get together and share their Beetle experiences. In the early 1970s, with the Beetle’s replacement, the Golf, on the drawing hoards, one had to wonder if it could ever reach the same cult status.

It didn’t take long after the launch of the Rabbit/Golf before Volkswagen enthusiast began to discover the potential of the new car. Europeans were the first to benefit from increased performance with the introduction of the GTI in 1976, but Americans weren’t too far behind, getting the GTI in 1983.

The water-cooled inline four-cylinder engine in the Golf and Rabbit was light but robust and capable of significantly more performance than it developed in stock trim. It didn’t suffer from as many limitations as the air-cooled Beetle engine, and it was a conventional design that could be easily worked on by any local machine shop.

But the front-wheel drive chassis of the Golf/Rabbit was its real strength. Nimble and predictable, it soon found its way onto the racetrack, where its cars quickly earned a reputation as giant killers in much the same way the Mini Cooper had during the 1960s. A variety of shock absorber, spring, and anti-roll bar packages were soon made available from European and American tuners. The “stress bar”, a bolt-in reinforcement that helps prevent chassis flex under hard cornering was developed for the somewhat flexible first generation Golf; it has since become a staple of the high-performance tuning industry.

Since its engine, drivetrain, and chassis could be modified to produce a high-performance machine that would embarrass much higher-priced machinery, the Golf had reinvented the idea of the affordable sports car. By the time the second generation of Golf was introduced in 1985i, the VW name was firmly established in the minds of automotive enthusiasts who were looking for cheap thrills.

Although Volkswagen’s corporate financial fortunes were waning at the end of the 1980s, the company was hard at work on the third generation of the Golf and its sister, the increasingly popular four-door Jetta sedan. Known internally as the A3, the cars were introduced amidst a crisis in quality control within the company and especially at the company’s Puebla, Mexico, plant, but they managed to slowly fight their way into the market. Although this cost Volkswagen huge amounts of market share, enthusiasts soon recognized the potential of the third-generation Golf and Jetta and got to work improving them.

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