Skip to main content

Watch: The world’s first sideways VW Camper Van goes racing

Just a few weeks ago we were stunned to discover the newest creation from Speedycop Lemons race team, the “Trippy Tippy Hippie Van“. Now we finally get a chance to see it in action, courtesy of Ridiculous Rides.

Through the years Jeff Bloch, aka Speedycop, has been building some of the wildest race cars in the series – including an upside-down Chevy Camaro – and now he’s gone sideways, quite literally. No, we’re not talking about drifting sideways (anyone can do that with a VW bus!), but a tilted sideways microbus.  

The team found a 1976 bay window bus that has been sitting in a Tennessee field for close to 20 years, rotated it and fastened it to a 1988 Rabbit, with a 16 valve GTI engine. According to Bloch, the 120hp engine can launch it to 60mph in around 8 seconds and reach a top speed of 100mph – if you can muster the bravery to do so.

In order to, you know, see, the top and bottom of the van were removed. But rather than just leave it, they added Lexan panels with pictures of a real microbus’s underside printed onto it. There’s also a picture of a trippy hippy glued onto the windshield.

file

It took Jeff and The Gang of Outlaws a thousand man-hours in the course of five weeks to build, and the team ran it at the Kentucky (Demo) Derby” at National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park, in Bowling Green, Kentucky with great success. They ran 224 laps of the 2-mile road course without any serious reliability issues. The only problem seemed to be that since it is top-heavy, in hard cornering it tries to tip over on its side – which in this case, is actually the roof…

The post Watch: The world’s first sideways VW Camper Van goes racing appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2uZdh2Y
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...