Volkswagen Beetles and Buses by Russell Hayes

Author:Russell Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Motorbooks
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Victor Norwood takes a break on his camper odyssey, hunting knife at the ready.

My Camper Van Summer

When I was nineteen, I had a part share in a Volkswagen camper. It was summer 1986, and it was a 1972 Danbury with big foam seats in the back and one rear seatbelt, which you slid under if somebody stopped too quickly.

My university friend Andy Hollingdale was the buyer and chief mechanic, and he’s still my friend. I asked him why he wanted a Volkswagen camper way back then, when he lived at home in Essex, then the epicenter of British VW customizing. “It was that surfing vibe,” he says. “I was big into windsurfing at the time, and it was just the start of that craze of campers being cool. The Beetles were coming up but campers hadn’t. They were quite reasonable so long as you didn’t want a split-screen. We actually just wanted something we could all go on holiday in.”

So after £500 between five of us and a parental £100, cheap holiday transport was ours. Friend Paul helped Andy respray it on the family driveway. The bumpers turned blue, and they had to rivet the VW badge to the front because in the late 1980s, fans of the band the Beastie Boys, who used VW badges as jewelry, were wrenching hundreds of badges a week from the front of any Volkswagen.

Then Andy, Deb (now Mrs. Hollingdale), Paul, Chris, and I set off for three weeks in France, Switzerland, and Italy. No motorways, cruising at 50 (km/h) and taking it in turns to drive. I still remember the relaxed pace, resting your upper body on the nearly flat steering wheel, the distant thrum of the rear engine, the unhurried gear change, approximate steering, and well-sprung driver’s seat with part of a spring sticking through. Meanwhile Chris was feeling sicker and sicker in the back seat until it became clear that the rear muffler was falling apart. We knocked the Danbury out of gear and coasted through villages as far as Dijon, where we chugged noisily around trying to find a VW dealership.

Almost ten years after the end of T2 European air-cooled Transporter production, a VW dealer sold us a new part at what we thought an outrageous £150. We thumped it into place at a campsite after Andy and I (as the French speaker) had to run into the local village and leave a deposit for a very specific spanner before the garage shut.

“We spent a lot of time making it look shiny,” Andy recalls. “Maybe changing the oil but not the brake fluid was a bit of a mistake.” Yes, we all still remember coming down the Alps into Italy as the brake fluid boiled, Andy engine braking and Paul pulling strategically on the handbrake.

But UEV 291K got us back to England in one piece. We ungraciously went back to university that autumn, leaving it on Deb’s mum’s driveway, and she sold it. We got our money back. We were cooler than we knew.

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