Bumblebee Mark 1 Volkswagen Golf TDI

We insure our customer’s eye catching pride and joy cars day in day out but some of these cars tend to catch our attention more than others. Paul Sall’s Mk1 Golf is a perfect example of this. We love Paul’s attitude to his Mk1 and the work he has completed, he has worked to a budget and has completed the lion’s share of the work himself and when you consider the finished article, it really is rather special indeed. Paul has an agreed valuation insurance policy, when the agreed value application arrived in our Safely Insured office, it caused quite a stir..

This is no ordinary Mk1 Golf, here’s Paul to tell you more:

Having owned over ten Mk1 VW Golf's between my brother and I, we decided back in 2008 to sell up all our Mk1 Golf spares after having recently sold our Mk1 Rivage so we could concentrate on building our First Generation Honda Prelude. Little did I know after months of ebaying and autojumbles that my brother would get itchy fingers and decide to buy 'Greenie' from a friend!

‘Greenie’ was originally a 1100cc Pea Green Mk1 and came with screwed in Zender arches and minimal interior. We had known the car for several years and decided to make a toy using nothing but pocket money.

The first thing my brother did was lose any unnecessary weight. He then got totally bored after a winter of snow and decided to buy a roll cage and begin bodywork to change the colour to yellow giving it a new name, ‘Bumblebee’. The idea was to build a track car with a 1100cc just to see how much fun we could have with a small engine.

So a few months rolled by and my brother spent much time replacing panels and producing a show car.

At the time I was out of a car so he offered it to me to start driving around so I bought the finishing touches and got the car taxed and tested in 2010.

After driving it for 18 months I got fed up with the unreliability from the leaking distributor and bought myself a Bora TDi with a view to swapping some of the running gear as a conversion into the Mk1.

Whilst I was in the engine bay I thought I would re-locate the brake unit to the driver’s side and run the full ABS and Traction control unit utilizing the full pedal-box and steering column from the Bora.

My to-do list was growing by three every-time I ticked one off the list, as I had not taken many changes into consideration. The engine came in and out the bay around eight times as I mapped out where each mount, boost pipe, cable, filter, nut and bolt was going taking up many evenings and weekends.

Eventually months later everything was in place and the car started. I dropped it off to a company for a once over and to have some sensors turned off. Unfortunate news came that the 5-speed gearbox I installed was faulty so I opted to have them install a new one so I could begin work on the Honda I mentioned earlier.

After a few weeks I had the car back and ready to take out when my dad decided to reverse into it. So back in the garage it went for a full re-paint! A blessing in disguise perhaps!

Bumblebee now sits on G60 steel wheels, with a 1.9 TDi ARL PD engine using a mk3 diesel 5-speed gearbox. It has Koni Coilovers, ABS and Traction Control. The interior compromises of 2 Recaro Capri seats on custom frames, with a half roll cage and MK5 6N2 Polo dashboard with MK4 clocks. My brother and I are pretty pleased with the results!

So.. there you have it, a fresh looking, reliable and economic Mk1, which should be on the road for many years to come! Great job Paul, hats off to you. Thanks for sharing this with us and if you don’t mind, keep us up to date with your 1st generation Honda Prelude as well!

Safely Insured are one of the UK’s leading engine-swap insurance specialist, we insure all sorts of engine swapped cars, anything from original Minis to our sponsored Nascar engined Toyota Corolla AE86 Drift car

If you are struggling to obtain insurance cover for your modified or engine swapped car, you really do need to contact the experts!