Vintage Picture Post - Bug Out 1997 + Scirocco Madness

Here are a few pics of my old friend Ryan's 1984 Jetta GLI. This was Bug Out 1997, the car was very clean, very straight, very strong, and was a mere $700 at the time. Jamex suspension, Borbet Type C copies, old school Zender spoiler. A pretty common selection of parts at the time. This particular car met its fate, like so many others, on the bottom half of Interstate I83 in downtown Baltimore. The car was toast, but it lived on, donating the head, transmission and rear brakes to my old Mk1 GTI project. It was a good car, and Ryan was a good friend...

Speaking of wrecks, Scirocco Madness had a slight setback when a crew came in to clean and prep the back lot of NGP for paving and general upkeep. As Jason put it, "a bunch of rednecks with big machines" did the moving, and it looks like we escaped mostly unscathed, but it's hard to say.


As of now it's sitting on the front valance, which sucks if it's damaged, as I was figuring on not running a front spoiler, but if it's damaged I'll just have to use the 16v kit which is in the car, or figure something else out. I'd rather not but sometimes you just do what you have to. I'm just hoping they set it down gently. I'm not putting money on that though.


The only for sure casualty of the move was the front bumper...no big deal there. They were going to be swapped out for something else anyway so that just speeds up the process. In the background you can just make out the Mk1 GTI that will most likely be donating its transmission, various mounts, hardware and whatever else we may need that I'm not going to want to buy. Which reminds me, I need to lock that down.

Anyway, next time I should have some more info on the drivetrain. I was planning on waiting on that for a good long while, but I realized an engine that I had built a few years ago was poking around and looking for a home, and while I'm not going to use the whole thing, I will use at least the head. Good times! Things are coming together much more quickly than I would have thought. Not that any work has been done yet, but at least it's sorta progressing.

_WRS