We can think of 2276 good reasons to build a California Look VW, but we’d probably never come up with the one that set Mark Houghton on the road to this hard-as-nails ’56. It was all his friend’s fault!
“It’s true!” he laughs.
If you’ve ever spent a moment perving over the UK Cal Look Register page on social media, chances are high you will have come across Joel Johnson’s green ’56. Mark and Joel are the archetypal ‘best friends for life’, and their mums were friends before them. They went to the same schools, grew up in the same area of Bromsgrove and, in their late teens, bought their first Beetles together.
With both approaching the mid-century in a couple of years’ time, that’s a lot of years spent in each other’s company, and more recently they have both experienced an air-cooled renaissance.
