Just A Car Guy: 1973 SCCA Rally bug! Scott got it after it had been sitting in the woods for 20 years, but right after acquiring it, life got in the way, it ended up going to California and then to the Grunderman museum in Germany.

Monday, December 04, 2017

1973 SCCA Rally bug! Scott got it after it had been sitting in the woods for 20 years, but right after acquiring it, life got in the way, it ended up going to California and then to the Grunderman museum in Germany.

from his first post on the Samba, back in 2008:

"I posted something along the lines of 'looking for project VW to work on with son' and got an interesting reply. A man a few towns away from me had a 73 Super that used to be a rally car and wanted it out of his yard. We communicated back and forth a few times and I made the trip to see it.

The car didn't belong to him, he used to be a crew member on the team and was storing it in his yard for the owner who had retired to NJ and now he was looking to get it out of his yard. Sitting under a tree was this orange and black Super with OLD OLD OLD SCCA and Uniroyal logos on it (and this strange crazed duck sticker too). Closer inspection showed this wasn't just an any old VW but was actually a competition car. It had rally gauges, full cage, competition seats and harness, etc.

The man, Bill, and his wife Stef were wonderful and I really enjoyed talking to them. They told me some history about this car, how it was campaigned in the early 70s in the USA and worldwide in professional rally racing with a crew and driver of VW and Porsche staff and was even photographed and discussed in an article in Popular Mechanics.

Since they didn't actually own the car, they couldn't sell it to me directly but they thought the owner would do so inexpensively so they put me in touch with him. He was a wonderful character and spent several hours on the phone with me detailing the history plus the cache of parts he had stored. He wanted it to all go as a package for about $2500, more than I had or was willing to spend at the time so I had to pass on the deal.

Yesterday (11 years later) I'm online when I come across a post for free firewood with an email address that looked familiar. I took a chance and shot an email to them asking if they were possibly the same people from 11 years ago, and if they were, whatever happened to the car. Well, if you couldn't guess by this point, they are the same people. The car is still there.

The owner passed about 6 months ago and just this past weekend they were talking to his widow and she just wanted them to get rid of it.

He picked it up for free

Bill told a few stories about running in the Alcan with this car and a rally in South Africa. The car was photographed for an article on the Alcan in Road & Track, I believe some time in 1992.

Bill did mention the brakes were upgraded, I looked and could see disks on the front with Porsche on the calipers. Under the hood (getting crumbly along the bottom edge, after releasing the rubber clamps, is a custom strut bar and connections for the calibrated odometer. The car has a nice heavy front skid plate and mounts for a tow bar plus hard points for driving lights. Inside are two old-school (but pretty nice) racing buckets, several custom gauges (couldn't see what they were in the fading light, roll cage,no back seat, racing harnesses, and surprisingly solid floors.