The Golf A59: The car which could have changed VW Motorsport

The Golf A59 is far from a secret for the most part, but it still remains one of the most mysterious and interesting Volkswagens of all time. There is still some confusion though, mainly about exactly how many A59 prototypes were made, and where they are. I'll address those to the best of my ability, but I don't claim to be all knowing, just in a unique position. I'll explain that later.

ANYways. I fell in love with it the moment I laid eyes on it, reading an issue of European Car way back in the stone age of paper, ink and pretty much no internet. The A59 was amazing to me. All wheel drive, wide fenders and a body made of carbon / kevlar, 16x7.5" Speedline wheels, turbocharged from the factory, all that good stuff. Here was the car that would make the Rallye Golf G60 a pathetic footnote in the lineage of Golf-based race cars. As luck would have it, that was not the case. It certainly had the ingredients.


The basics are as follows: VW contacted Schmidt Motorsport of Germany and had them design the A59 for their motorsport branch. SMS consisted of several players in the rally and motorsport scene back in the 90's and late 80's. The team was lead by Konrad Schmidt, who was involved in the Audi Quattro rally program, so he was no stranger to the land of VW and Audi performance. Work on the project started around 1992, and was supposed to debut in 1994.

The A59 was to be a Group A / Group N machine, meaning 2500 would have been produced to homogate the car for the World Rally Championship. One of the more interesting aspects of the A59's design was that SMS did not use anything even close to a standard VW engine. VW's standard family of inline-4 motors are hopelessly undersquare. This is ideal for torque and average drivers and average driving conditions, but undersquare motors don't like to rev. A racing motor needs to rev. So rather than take the standard 1984cc 82mm x 92.8mm 16v engine and adapt that to competition use, a clean sheet design was used, with a perfectly square 86mm bore and 86mm stroke. That's more like it.


Of course the engine was turbocharged, and with the new head design this was apparently a necessity. SMS decided to use much large valves than an atmospheric engine would be able to take advantage of...they would rely on positive manifold pressure to make up for any loss in flow and efficiency at lower RPM's. In standard form it was said the A59 would make 275 hp @ 6000rpm, and 273lb/ft of torque at 3500rpm, with enough headroom to make 400hp unrestricted. Not bad at all.

Putting all this power to ground was a brand new all wheel drive system. Not the crap Syncro system which was used on the Rally, but an electronically controlled type, quite similar to the Haldex system currently used by VW in their 4-motion and R32 cars. Interior was to be outfitted with a digital dash, Recaro A8 seats and an optional competition roll cage.


But is was never put into production. At the time that the press was first learning of the A59 back in 1994, the project had already been shelved. Something about a recession...hmm...sounds familiar. VW Motorsport kept one of their two prototypes for the museum, where it was kept under wraps until the early 2000's when it was rolled out, sans engine. (why was that you ask? I'll fill in the blanks in a few days) A second prototype was made, as you can see from the pictures there is a substantial difference in the fender design and rear spoiler and air-intake area on the C-pillar, but it was either destroyed or has been lost.

There is not a third A59. SMS did however make three complete Carbon-kevlar body kits. The first is what is what is on the still-living A59 prototype with the duck-tail spoiler. The second is on the "lost" prototype, which had larger fender flares and the different rear spoiler and A-pillar treatment. This is the same design, as far as I can tell, as the third body kit.


The third bodykit was sitting on the shelf at SMS for nearly a decade, until an interested party with the cash to buy it (and the connections to know it existed in the first place) had it deliver lock stock and barrel to British Columbia. There the hood and rear wing were traded for parts, while the rest of the kit, including the side skirts, fenders, quarter pabels and front and rear bumpers were installed on a Blue 1997 Driver's Edition GTI VR6.

So what of this third kit? That is a post-in-progress. As soon as Blaksquirrel loads the images into the Flickr account, I'll be ready with a story.


A few more pics at the WRS Flickr page.... All I really have to say in the end, is imagine if this Golf had made it into production? Not only would it have been a worthy adversary to the Escort Cosworth, Impreza WRX and other cars of the day, but we would have a completely different family of engines to choose from. A perfectly square fresh design without the limitations of previous architecture. Something 100 times better than the 1.8t, which is a fine if slightly underwhelming engine at the end of the day: it was not designed for performance, it was designed to provide the torque of a small V6 while delivering better fuel economy. Anyway, I'll have more on the engine from the A59 soon enough....Stay tuned!

_WRS