After smacking his beetle into a racetrack wall, Glenn Torrens finds peace in a minor detail
1976 VW Beetle
SIDE BY SIDE
There was the sound of mud being slapped onto the undercarriage as I slid backward from the bitumen, but no explosion of glass to follow the THOONK of hitting the wall. Sitting there collecting my thoughts for a few seconds, I reckoned that was a good thing; no shower of glass pellets was the one positive outcome from my decision to brake just a splimity-teenth of a second too late… on a damp, downhill left-hander.
Unharnessed and out, I gingerly examined the left-rear (of the car). Although knocked ajar, the engine lid was undamaged, as was the engine and left-hand carburettor. The mudguard was squashed flat, but the wheel seemed to be pointing in the right direction, so I hopped back into my now battle-scarred little yellow VW Beetle and drove slowly back to the pits, feeling for wobbles on the way.
Closer inspection revealed the Beetle’s rear quarter-panel was punched in about 50mm – enough to pull the pillars out of alignment; not quite enough to break the side window – but the car drove with straight steering. After a little attention with a hammer, fellow nutter Dave Morley and I continued our weekend’s track shenanigans.
I put aside some time to properly repair the damage several months later. Earlier in the year, I’d condemned a later-model VW: sand-blasting revealed it not worthy of restoring, so it became a parts donor. I unpicked the damaged panel, straightened the sub-structure (it was crushed back to the roll-cage mount) and installed the section cut from the dead Bug.
Even though I carefully installed the panel into my weekend warrior and matched the bright yellow paint, something continued to trouble me. The donor car had been fitted with flow-through ventilation, so now one side of my Beetle featured a little half-moon vent behind the rear window and the other side didn’t.
I’m no perfectionist, but I do like things reasonably neat and tidy. So for months, every time I washed the VW, or worked on it, or even glanced at it sitting in my workshop, I could see a vent fitted on one side and absent from the other. It was as aggravating as a dripping tap, or a crooked painting. How could one small detail be so inordinately annoying?
So, one wet, cold and miserable winter weekend, I removed the driver’s side rear quarter window, peeled back the headlining and got busy, grafting-in the other vent-equipped section of metal from the later model. Sliced, welded, filled, smoothed, primed and painted, my little yellow Beetle looks balanced and wholesome again.
Photography: Glenn Torrens