FORTUNATE SON
Tommy Connolly knows a thing or two about luck, and it’s not always the good kind. Six years in the making, his aired out, widebody Mk7 results as much from knowing the right people at the right time as it does his willingness to try new ideas. But it’s a process that’s been steered just as heavily by the moments he’d rather forget, and that includes the one that kickstarted the entire build. Until a few months before he bought it, he’d probably have imagined his route to a feature car panning out very differently.
“Before this, I had a Mk5 Rabbit with the 2.5-litre engine,” he recalls. “I’d owned it from new, and I loved it. But in fall 2014 there was some heavy construction work in the area and, while I was out driving, someone two cars in front of me clipped a water main cap which stood it up on its side. The truck ahead of me went over it, but I caught it right in the subframe. It broke the steering rack, cracked the subframe and the airbags went off. The car was an absolute fucking mess.”
That’s not a hobby-level diagnosis. Tommy spent formative years visiting his mechanic father at work, seeding a love of cars that led him to ignore passed-down advice to give the motor trade a miss. Today,
