From the archives... Abt Sportsline Cup 2.0 Jetta

Despite my best efforts, I finally ran out of hard drive space on my trusty Macbook. I fought it for a while, but even after deleting a bunch of unneeded, space-hogging videos and various junk, it had to be taken care of. So I made the purchase a few weeks ago, but oddly enough I'm not the most computer savvy person in the world when it comes to those of the desktop variety. I can solder a chip or repair a connection on a Bosch ECU with the best of them, but crack open a laptop and I'm all question marks.

Josh (blacksquirrel) is the resident computer pro, so I lured him over to Chateau de Rennsport (French / German...sure, why not!) with the promise of some free tacos from De Mole. My Lacie external backup drive had decided to pack it in, awesome, so Josh had to bring his over for the cloning process, which as you can imagine went for much longer than we expected. Pretty typical. At any rate, the plus side of this is that his drive was left overnight for me to complete the process, and lo and behold, it has a bunch of pictures on it that he's too lazy busy to send me for the blog.

This particular shot is a reject (slide film son!) from a Performance VW shoot, probably around 2000 or 2001. I don't recall the owner's name, but he was a really cool guy, who drove all the way from California for the honor of a feature! To Waterfest! Talk about commitment. The car had a full ABT Sportsline Cup widebody, which is in my opinion the best around for the Mk3, along with some other items, the specifics on which escape me. The raw carbon fiber hood perhaps takes away a little and dates the overall style, but there's no faulting the rest of the car. Nice and low without looking silly, OZ wheels, just a nice looking car. A true classic, and proof that VW's have been doing the whole 'stance' thing while the import guys were still rocking et45 Konigs on their Wings West Civics.

For the record, I like imports, so no hate mail please.

On a somewhat related tangent, I was reading Hot Rod today, (eye opening magazine by the way, really well written) and they used the word 'Stance' in a feature story. Does that constitute shark-jumping? Discuss....

Full Sized Pic

_WRS