Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i VWT Lifestyle

After living abroad for a number of years, my wife (Tracey), dog (Badger) and myself moved back to the UK in 2015, and two years later bought this 1970 Bay Window. It was imported from Arizona sometime around 2010, and then in 2017 the then owner decided to sell as they were not using it much. I left Beautiful Days festival near Exeter one day to drive to Bournemouth to have a look at it, and agreed the deal there and then before rushing back to the festival to continue the festivities and picked it up a month later. The owner put in a new headlining, door trims, rock ‘n’ roll bed and buddy seats as part of the deal, and it was mine. A long trip from Bournemouth to…

“You pay more for a T6 compared to other manufacturers, but when it comes to trading in, you’re likely to get most of your money back” As you’ve no doubt noticed, camping’s become the new black since the first lockdown of 2020. The combination of great weather in spring and early summer that year combined with an uncertainty surrounding travel abroad meant UK holidays were one of the few things people could look forward to. Yep, our fine isles sure have plenty to offer when it comes to amazing scenery and places to visit – a fact that wasn’t lost on Nick Harding and his partner Carolann Swallow. The couple had previously dismissed the idea of owning a campervan, but after weighing up their options, finally decided to bite the…

The Volkswagen scene has undoubtedly changed since the turn of the century. In fact, it seems everyone is going ‘Bus crazy’ these days. Advertising firms happily use them to convey that ’60s or ’70s beach lifestyle, auction houses are delighted to see the values of Type 2s reaching record highs and more grey-haired and financially stable individuals are joining the pool of buyers. Yeah, you might say that the Bus hobby is doing rather well! But, boy, what a change of attitude, compared to the 1980s and ’90s… Very few Split and Bay Windows would participate in the ‘new wave’ VW meets, as these vehicles suffered from a certain image they dragged from previous decades – Buses were usually associated with hippies and Flower Power. In stark contrast, today’s VW…

Buses – and Campers in particular – have been majorly in the spotlight this year and across the board values have rocketet. But now the holiday season’s over, this might be a good time to take the plunge, especially if you snap up something you can make better over winter and enjoy in 2022. Classic auctions are always a good place to look for this kind of thing and a quick trawl of the more recent sales results revealed some tempting winter projects. The ’67 import Split (below) was entered into a Tennants auction in mid-October with an estimate of £22,000-£25,000 but sold for £18,000. It’s undergone a restoration, but there’s always scope for improvement – and next spring you’ll be paying a stack load more for a similar example.…

This beautiful white over blue 1966 11-Window Kombi is called Chippy. He was named after the current owner’s grandfather and belongs to a chap by the name of Joe Sugg. Joe has been running a successful YouTube channel for over ten years, but you may be more familiar with his efforts on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing in 2018 and Celebrity Bake Off in 2020. Despite his notoriety though, he’s a down to earth guy and more than happy to chat about his reasons for buying Chippy, how the purchase went down and his experiences with classic Camper ownership. “My Uncle had a Bay Window Camper, coincidently the same colour as Chippy,” Joe recalls. “We used to go away in it on family holidays to Devon and Cornwall with my cousins.…

We think it’s fair to say, we’ve featured a fair number of Buses over the years. Someone with more time and, let’s be honest, more inclination than us could while away a few days counting them all, but if there’s one thing all those seemingly endless features have done it’s to have given us a sort of sixth-sense when it comes to guessing the type of person who owns the machine we’re going to be writing about. It’s a bit like we’re Mystic Meg playing an automotive version of Guess Who? We only need a couple of clues about someone’s car background to work out the sort of Camper that floats their boat. “If you want to increase the attitude, you just need to decrease the altitude” So, when we…

It’s almost impossible not to smile at a Tempo Matador. It looks like a slightly bemused alien badly in need of some sleep – although we mean that in a genuinely affectionate way. But for all the endearing cuteness, the Matador is both fascinating and pioneering. At a time when commercial vehicles were generally just very basic and traditional, it featured front-wheel drive, years before Volkswagen (and practically everybody else, for that matter) got around to it. And it introduced Volkswagen to Australia well before the marque itself made its own official inroads into the country that would grow to love it just as much as Europe and the USA. Yet it survived in its original form for just a few years – from 1949 to 1952 –before Volkswagen tried…

If anyone read my recent road trip feature, they’ll already know that I sold my Bay and now own a T5 Caravelle. So why would a diehard air-cooled guy, someone who’s owned air-cooled VWs for 30 years, suddenly switch allegiances? The truth is it just made complete sense. The Bay simply didn’t fit in with where my life is at right now. I have a young daughter with my partner, and she has two older boys. We also have two large, oafish dogs and the tin-top Bay was just too small, too low and too slow to get us all where we wanted to be. The funds from the Bay sale also came in handy during lockdown. When things opened up a bit, we felt the need to get away…

After last year’s postponement, due to the Covid pandemic, The Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show, with discovery+, made a welcome return to Birmingham’s NEC over the weekend of November 12-14, with over 60,000 enthusiasts attending. The remit of the event is truly eclectic, encompassing a wide range of models and marques with 270 car clubs, ranging from the AC Owners’ Club to the XR4 Register, including around 3000 vehicles on show across seven halls, with plenty to interest VW fans amongst the various displays. UNDER THE HAMMER This 1979 former Panel Van (above right) was sold for £15,750 by Silverstone Auctions, with all proceeds from the sale going to Prostate Cancer UK. Restored and converted into a Camper by Practical Classics magazine and Lancaster Insurance Services it was repainted to…

Campervanning, as you’ll be well aware, is a tremendously versatile way to see the world. You can call pretty much anywhere home for the night, depending on how much driving stamina you have and where you fancy giving up for the day and getting the dinner on. Well, perhaps not exactly ‘anywhere’ – you can’t just pitch up on a stranger’s driveway or the hard shoulder of the A3, you need to do it somewhere proper… but the options are near-endless, and there’s the added bonus (if such things flicker on your radar) that you’ll look awesome doing so. VW campervans are inherently cool, that’s a gimme, and you’ll get admiring glances and cheery waves from people of all generations. No petrol station fill-up will be completed without somebody coming…

Having tackled the Picos de Europa mountain range the previous year in my T25, we’d decided to stay a bit closer to home for our next trip in Campanula, my trusty Bay Window. Starting off in our hometown, the capital, we would head westwards to Wales, cross the water to Ireland then return via Scotland – ticking off some of the most glorious countryside the British Isles has to offer in the process. We hatched a plan that involved mum, Sam, little sister Sian and my faithful Old English Sheepdog Wooly travelling with me in Campanula, while my brothers Eliott and Nick would tag along in Eliott’s Fiesta. So, on a Tuesday, the first week of our trip, we chugged along the M4 westwards to Pembroke Dock where we had…

There’s nothing worse than buying a Bus and being handed literally a handful of keys by the previous owner. Okay, maybe there is something worse: not being able to either lock or unlock your pride and joy, either because the keys don’t work properly, or because there’s something wrong with the latches themselves. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve bought Buses or had a customer bring a Bus to me with a similar tale to tell. But I’m here to show you that getting your locks sorted out and onto one key really isn’t brain surgery. In fact, it can be a surprisingly therapeutic job to carry out on your Bus and one that means you won’t be fumbling for the right key the next time you exit your…