Volkswagens, particularly the tricked-out variety, have been coexisting like curds and whey with car enthusiasts in Southern California, almost since the bombed-out Wolfsburg plant slowly came back to life. Volkswagens in California took all forms, from dead stock to surfboard-toting Sambas, to the first dune buggies, to end-chopped Baja specials with towering stinger exhausts, down through the decades. Other fans turned Volkswagens into diminutive Gassers for the drag strips. If you’re of a certain age, you may have even built the glue kit by Revell—which started out in Hollywood—that built up into an EMPI-equipped performance Beetle.
More than 50 years later, EMPI is still very much in business. And people from around California, and especially the Los Angeles metro area, are still heart-throbbing with joy over air-cooled Volkswagens, especially the built-up kind. What we’re talking about here is embodied by this faithfully authentic, yet enthusiastically modified, 1965 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, the delightful Type-1 (Beetle)-based sportcoupe. It’s the product of one technically savvy owner’s mental picture of what a Volkswagen that was fit for both go-fast moves and street cruising could logically be. The owner of this Karmann Ghia took an interrupted buildup and made it his very own, using techniques practiced at his workplace, which produces very sophisticated fuel-injection systems for a variety of modern vehicles.
