ONE CAREFUL DONOR
Although there’s an underlying risk of the unknown in any used car, the potential for pain is never greater nor more unpredictable than it is when you take on someone else’s project. Tracing the mental hoopjumping behind years of custom work can turn apparently minor headaches into a rat’s nest of problems, sometimes to the point of uneconomical repair. But for Teemu Vähämäki, that rollercoaster process unfolded in reverse.
“About six years ago, I was looking for a Mk2 Golf for a 1.8T swap, and my tuner friend Janne was selling the Corrado with the engine already in it,” he tells us. “The car wasn’t pretty, but the plan was to slaughter it – to strip the engine out and use it somewhere else. But there aren’t many of these in Finland, and I started to like the shape. The more I drove it, the more I fell in love with it.”
Given the luck he’s had with previous projects, that’s an Olympic-grade leap of faith. Based near Helsinki, Teemu spent his childhood churning up the fields of the family horse farm on an ATV between trips to Germany to buy livestock, and eventually set his sights on importing a Passat 1.8T as a first car. The market had other ideas, putting him behind the wheel of a
