It’s a personal thing, building a car. You don’t have to have spend long chatting to owners to realise their interpretation how something should look or feel is unique, or that each feature car is born out of a lifetime of individual inspirations. For those who love the process, the nod of appreciation for a finished project can be bittersweet – a hard-earned reward, tinged with the nagging urge to explore fresh ideas with something new. So when you see a former feature car still breaking boundaries years later, it’s always worthy of a second look.
Three years on from its first PVW feature, and Christian Gale’s Mk5 GTI is one of those rare machines. “I remember a friend saying at the time, now it’s been featured I might as well sell it,” he tells us. “But I had a picture of what I wanted the car to be, and the only way to have that show-winning project is to keep changing things. It all escalated from looking at what I could do to make this the best Mk5 in the UK.”
Those ambitions are a far cry from where the Golf started out. Raised around his Dad’s bodyshop work and classic Mini projects, Christian cut his own automotive teeth on modified Novas and RenaultSport Clios before a Mk3 Golf steered him towards Volkswagens and a friend’s Mk5 GTI set him on a course for this one in 2016. The only Candy White three-door
