'96 VW Golf 3 VR6 - Winter mode activated

Current state:



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Soooo!

My previous daily was a 2010 Ford Mondeo, it was good car but I wanted to get back into something older again as to me it always felt kinda like driving a rental.

16 years ago my first car was a '92 Golf GT Special with a few mods:



When I sold that a year later, I always swore I'd own another Mk3 one day.

Fast forward to this year.

When a buddy of mine took me along to a Mk2 only meet earlier this year, I came out of that day inspired to look for Mk2s with AC for sale but ended up finding very few and none of them really caught my eye. Then I figured I might as well look at Mk3s again. A bit shocked by what people wanted for them, because a good, original VR6 seems to be roughly between 10 and 15 thousand Euros. That's when I remembered - a buddy of mine had a VR6 sitting in the back of his shop that he bought just because it was offered to him for cheap by a customer. A quick phone call later, I went over there to have a look at the car. I saw it on the lift and I was impressed - the last time I had seen a Mk3 this clean was probably 15 years ago, and even then I can remember seeing cars with rotted out strut towers, non existant sills and swiss cheese'd hatches. The only rust on this one was a small hole on the passenger side fender.

However, the car had sat for about 10 years, so some more work was likely to be expected.

The interior was in very good condition too, although some trim pieces were missing or broken. The leather seats were retrofitted by my buddy, the matching door cars were included, although not fitted on the car.The engine ran, but sounded bad - the chain would need replacing. We struck a very decent deal - I basically got the car for what it cost him + whatever the chain plus some paint on the fenders (I'd source a new passenger side fender first), which was roughly 5k€.

Ready for collection at my buddy's place:



Then I drove it over to my garage.























Then I got it registered.