1969 Volkswagen Beetle Inside the G-Games- Doodle Me This

Final Score: 104.5 pts.2 Second Place

It looks like something an obsessed VW fan would doodle in the margins of a self-help book. Cartoonishly wide fenders, narrow body and a tall roof. Jack Van Wettering's 1969 Volkswagen Type I doesn't fit the mold from which 21 million Beetles popped. It is, in a word, a ringer.

Of course, if any magazine should be allowed to bring a ringer to the G-games, it's VW Trends, right? Its entire stable of possible entrants is, after all, based on a bare-bones transportation pod designed almost 70 years ago. Bare bones it still is. Transportation pod?Forget it.

Van Wettering's Bug arrived on a trailer and went home on a trailer, just as it does any time it goes anywhere. More than a modified Bug, it is a purpose-built hillclimb car with a Type I body balanced precariously on top.

Weighing 1,700 lbs, it makes a claimed (and very believable) 225 hp from a 2,387cc air-cooled amalgam of forged, shot-peened, ported, relieved and massaged parts-none of which came from a Volkswagen factory. The car's only claim to being a street car is the license plate bolted to the engine lid. The plate is surrounded with a frame claiming 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds-a claim we believed with one stab of the throttle.

Tempted as we were, we didn't test that claim. We were here to test handling. Every car in our test wore the same BF Goodrich g-Force KD tires, but Van Wettering's Bug normally wears tires in 225/45R-15 front and 245/50R-15 rear-neither found in the g-Force KD catalog. As a result, a last-minute substitution of Comp T/A Drag Radials had to be made. The tires still were not ideal at 225/45R-15 front and rear, but Van Wettering made do.

Driving the VW is just plain silly. Stab the trottle and a clattering eruption of noise accompanies the uniquely effortless acceleration possible only in cars weighing less than a ton. Drive it hard and the 3-gallon dry sump spits hot oil at the driver. Corner with sufficient conviction and the interior fills with tire smoke. It gives a whole new meaning to being one with the machine.

To drive this mechanical concoction around the skidpad is to spin it. The trick is to spread that spin around the whole circle. Driven with the ass hung appropriately wide, the controlled spin earned it 1.01g, the second highest reading we saw all day and a precursor to an unpredictable second-place overall finish. -Dave Coleman