CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
As motorsports go, few can match the diversity in the paddocks that you’ll get with the drift scene. Even professional events attract every shade of the automotive spectrum, from Japanese coupes to Swedish wagons, united only by the ability to put power to their rear axle. So while Golfs have been tracked, rallied and dragged for as long as they’ve been available to buy, you won’t find many rubbing shoulders with the drift fraternity. After all, that would mean pretty much starting from scratch, right?
“It was sort of an accident buying this car,” says Toni Varelius, as we line up what appears to be a standard Mk7 at the showroom where he works. “I wanted a drift missile at the time, so I joked to my friends about building one out of a Golf. They laughed and said it was the dumbest idea they had ever heard. So I took it as a challenge, to prove them wrong.”
Perhaps as a result of its 18-hour winter nights, Finnish workshops are a hotbed for the sort of no-holds-barred re-engineering you’re looking at here. Beneath the unmodified bodywork of a cooking-spec Mk7, the visible bars of a substantial roll cage let slip that there’s a little more muscle packed into this car than Wolfsburg ever equipped it with. Namely the
