VIENNESE WHIRL

I’ve been a part of the VW scene since the mid-late ‘80s; even though I didn’t get my first Beetle until age 16 in 1991, I was buying magazines, going to shows (or dragging my parents to them) and spending every waking moment thinking about building them. In my early formative years, the UK style of customising VWs was heavily influenced by what was going on in California but then morphed to the point that UK Cal Look was a style unto itself.

You see, although thousands of VW fans in the UK at the time were trying to soak up everything they could that was coming out of California, we didn’t have the internet and those influences were limited to sporadic magazine coverage, between issues of which you had a month to imagine how you’d build the car you’d just seen