VOLKSWAGEN SCIROCCO MKI (1981)

I LAST DROVE A VW SCIROCCO SOME 30 years ago. I picked up the key to this one, and I was a teenager again. How does that happen? How can the texture of a key, the click of a doorhandle, the buckling of a seatbelt cut through the intervening decades with such clarity? I'll tell you why it happened to me - a Scirocco like this was my first car. My first taste of freedom. My companion. And you always remember your first, don't you? Special place reserved.

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Mine was inherited from my grandfather who'd owned it from new, a 1980 GLi that was 12 years and 84,000 miles old by the time it came into my grubbies. So it had always been there, part of my childhood, many happy hours spent held in by a lap belt in the back seat. My grandad replaced it with a MkII that he was never as keen on.

The MkII, which came along in 1981, was built on largely the same underpinnings as the original, but the design work was done internally. Should have let Giorgetto Giugiaro at it again. The MkII lost the clean lines and wonderful proportions of the original. Funny, isn't it, how cars that have great proportions age so well? The lights and skinny pillars date it, yet there's still a freshness about the original Scirocco that cuts through the years.