This hybrid Golf MkI could be the only survivor of the Manufacturers’ Challenge Saloon Car series which promised so much in 1980 but ultimately delivered so little. It’s a sin that this real racer never raced the series…

Imagine something that weighs just 640 kilograms and makes 142 kilowatts. Some quick arithmetic and you get a power-to-weight ratio of 222kW/tonne. That’s quite a lot higher than, say, a Nissan GT-R. 

Being a Colin Chapman disciple, when Durban businessman Kingsley Wood set out to challenge the motorsport might of BMW and Ford in the late 1970s with a Volksie, he knew the only chance for success in such a David and Goliath confrontation was to make the car as light as possible. And the best way to make it light was to build a steel spaceframe and cover it with the outer skin of a three-door Golf MkI, then use aluminium sheeting for the floor and finally to make the wheelarches and doors from fibreglass. With the 209kW turbo engine for which this car was designed, it had the potential to be quite something.

Wood and his brother Ralph contributed most of the labour, and were helped with suspension work and fabrication by Andre van der Watt, then a toolmaker for VWSA and now their motorsport manager. 

The year was 1980 and the South African circuit racing fraternity was all abuzz with the Manufacturers’ Challenge Saloon Car championship, a no-holds-barred series which heralded a return to a national championship for tin-tops with many of the big names (both drivers and brands) taking to the track while enthusiastic crowds urged them on.

Sarel van der Merwe steered a V6-engined Ford Escort, Ian Scheckter was at the helm of a trick BMW 5-Series, and Dave Charlton weighed in with a fast but fragile Fiat 131 powered by a turboed Ferrari V6. Geoff Mortimer was in a V8 Chevair and there was also a Mazda 323 with a rotary engine, while a good few privateers made up the numbers. The promise was of more to come in 1981.

The rules were broad: cars had to look like the donor machine in silhouette, have the same suspension pick-up dimensions, be powered by an engine from the same stable, and, er, use the standard floorpan. This latter requirement was open to interpretation. Some builders read the rule to mean that a few squares inches of original floor would suffice, which is where the trouble started. 

It ended in a massive crash between Scheckter and Supervan at the Kyalami finale, with both cars all but destroyed as they took each other off rather than yield. Expensive racing componentry was scattered across the highveld and in the acrimonious aftermath both brands vowed to stop competing rather than share the track with the other. The series rapidly rolled over and died.

For people like Wood, who had sunk a small fortune in time and money into the project, the news was devastating: for 1981 there would be nowhere to race the car he had just built. Not only that, but he was waiting for the imminent go-ahead on a R63 500 package which could’ve bought VW into the series as his main sponsor, making it viable to order a trick 209kW 1 420cc turbo motor from Germany.