BEETLE MANIA

ROB DOWNING TAKES AN UNASSUMING VW BUG AND GIVES IT A NEW IDENTITY AS A PUMPED-UP, TURBOCHARGED TOUGHIE

- GLEN TORRENS

THE iconic Volkswagen Beetle remains a hugely popular project vehicle for keen tinkerers worldwide. That's despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that it's a mechanically odd shitbox, with its squashed-flat, air-cooled, mostly alloy engine up its bum and a body design that hardly changed for 70 years. Of course, plenty of folks are into Beetles just because they reckon they look cute, but that's not a word you'd associate with this monster Bug built by Rob Downing.

Rob, a Queensland-based mechanic and auto electrician, has like many of us been sniffing petrol for a long time. The first car he tinkered with, a 1964 EH Holden, remains in his possession nearly 30 years after he rebuilt it, and he clearly recalls the first Beetle he worked on.

“It was a dead-stock 1970s Super Bug with the coil-spring front end,” he says. “I had to service it, and I hardly knew anything about them. I was a 100 per cent newbie, so I decided it was junk. I hated it!”

A decade later, a family tragedy prompted Rob and his wife Celina to take some time off, and they decided to build a car together. “I knew she liked 1955 Chevs, so that’s what I thought we'd build, but she said to me: ‘I want a Volkswagen!’ Rob says. “I was like, ‘Oh no!’”

Although Beetles looked pretty much the same for the 20-odd years they were made here in Oz, there were significant differences under those curves depending on the model. Rob was aware of that, but he still had to learn what was what, what was hot and what was not. “One of the blokes I was doing roadworthies for ran a VW workshop, so I asked him for a crash course in ‘Beetle’,” he explains. “Out of that information, I worked out that the 1968-1971 model would be the best one to buy.