LIMITED ADDITION

For most people, buying a new car is all about making decisions and sticking with them, but the unfixed boundaries of a project mean there’s always a healthy degree of indecision involved. Once you start to think of cars as a blank canvas rather than a finished consumer product, you’re effectively only limited by the depths of your budget and the limits of your patience. That mental process can snowball into wild deviations that leave little or no trace of what left the showroom, but it can just as easily turn into a tireless fixation on the tiniest of details.

The latter becomes all the more tempting with time. This summer marks 30 years since the first Mk3s rolled off the line in Wolfsburg, and even the newest examples have almost a quarter-century of life under their belts. As a global car which, if you count the facelifted ragtop, effectively lived on into the early 2000s, it’s spawned numerous international variations, special editions and in-life upgrades during that lifespan – even without factoring in the Vento (or Jetta, for our American readers). In turn, there’s a sizeable store of obscure add-ons to sift through, even within the boundaries of the ETKA parts catalogue. The only challenge is tracking them down.

Wading through the depths of limited-run Mk3 Golf special editions is