Since the age of four, for Martyn Lee owning a Beetle was always a fantasy. Until one day, at long last he became the owner of the kind of Beetle that IS a fantasy.
Martyn lives in a town with a lot of seagulls, which is tremendously hazardous when your car has no roof. But the upside is that he can go cruising by the seafront whenever he wants.
That’s what he was doing on the sunny Sunday afternoon when we hung out with him, just a week or two after the Beetle of Dreams had become his. The car had only just been finished a couple of months before that, having been built by its previous owner, David Southam.
David is one of these people who, by his own admission, ‘always has to have a project on the go.’ And he had always wanted a split-screen Type 2. Martyn had a Splitty but wanted a Beetle. You can see where this is going, right?
The Type 2 set sail for David’s workshop, where its new owner got down to the job of fitting independent rear suspension to create the necessary space for a bigger engine. The Beetle went in the other direction; Martyn soon started adding some touches of his own to what was already a fully fledged work of art, but mainly
