Aircooled VW South Africa

Heddles wrote:

Hi guys

Searching for totally something else, I happened on this (rather interesting) site and saw my car, the VW Caracal, under discussion. Interestingly, soon after the photo was taken (by Heddles) at Killarney Raceway, the Caracal was surrounded by Mazda MX-5's - my other passion in life. (Visit us at www.mx5wc.co.za) I bought the Caracal from the late Billy Young with the idea of putting it through a full restoration: when I got the car, it was in (almost) going and (almost) road-worthy condition. It's been re-painted, re-roofed, re-tyred and some mechanical work had been done. The car is now in a "driveable" condition but with more work planned. The most recent article re the Caracal was by Mike Monk and appeared in the January 2016 issue of topcar magazine: in this article, Monk writes about the Caracal and three other South African cars considered important to our motoring history - the GSM Dart, the Protea and the Duphet.

The Caracal is a beautiful thing in the flesh. And with the mechanicals now also being sorted, it will soon be what is was designed to be: a high-spec, high performance sports car. I have often wondered: if VW went ahead with the development, manufacture and marketing of the Caracal, how would it have stacked up against my beloved MX-5? Re-reading the road test of the first MX-5 (Car Magazine, December 1990) and comparing it to the Caracal, I personally am convinced that we would have been celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Caracal in 2014 .......... (There is, of course, an ironic twist to that road test: in the same edition of Car, my Caracal appears on the front page with a write-up about it on p106. Little did I know at the time ......)

The last time that I put a car through a full resto was some 35 years ago: I then entrusted all the work to a single workshop who took the project on as a turnkey job. Today, I am wondering if such a project should not perhaps be left to someone a little younger - and with a better command of the more spicy side of The Queen's English! Or perhaps the car should be housed in one of our excellent motoring museums - it simply is that important to our motoring history.

Hello guys....

I see that this is quite an old thread and I don't know if anyone would still be interested in this car.
Saw this at Kilarney yesterday and knowing and having worked on it, I decided to try and find out more about their current status. A search landed me on this forum so here goes. My info about these cars.

I have driven one, albeit in the nineties. There were two in Cape Town, a blue and a red one. The engines were mid mounted, as in behind the driver. For its time, they were quite impressive. Surprisingly rigid for the roofless design and the KR engine with the 2Y gearbox certainly made for some decent performance. I was involved with a guy by the name of Eric Booth at the time, who was building kit cars in Diep River in Cape Town at the time and he was somehow connected to the creator of this car. Eric was building a car called a Manx at the time. Also mid mounted and actually quite a cute little piece of work.



The story went and I am open to correction, which I have contacted Eric for, that there were five built, of which three had to be destroyed in the process of testing crumple zones. I will update for any of you who might be interested...

So if this is correct and it could be wrong by one car, maybe two went to be crashed, then there are only two cars left. Not necessarily a stunning car but a little piece of SA motoring achievement in my opinion..