The Volkswagen Scirocco Mk1: should you meet your heroes?

I last drove a VW Scirocco some 30 years ago. I picked up the key to this one, and I was a teenager again. How does that happen? How can the texture of a key, the click of a doorhandle, the buckling of a seatbelt cut through the intervening decades with such clarity?

I’ll tell you why it happened to me – a Scirocco like this was my first car. My first taste of freedom. My companion. And you always remember your first, don’t you? Special place reserved. 

Mine was inherited from my grandfather who’d owned it from new, a 1980 GLi that was 12 years and 84,000 miles old by the time it came into my grubbies. So it had always been there, part of my childhood, many happy hours spent held in by a lap belt in the back seat. My grandad replaced it with a MkII that he was never as keen on.

Photography: Jonny Fleetwood

The MkII, which came along in 1981, was built on largely the same underpinnings as the original, but the design work was done internally. Should have let Giorgetto Giugiaro at it again. The MkII lost the clean lines and wonderful proportions of the original. Funny, isn’t it, how cars that have great proportions age so well? The lights and skinny pillars date it, yet there’s still a freshness about the original Scirocco that cuts through the years.

It arrived in 1974, a sort of replacement for the Karmann Ghia coupe that had tried (and largely succeeded) in being a Beetle with added glamour. The Scirocco toed the family line much more closely, and actually debuted six months ahead of the first Golf – the idea being to get any production niggles sorted before the bigger volume hatchback followed it down the line at Wolfsburg.

This one is a last of the line Storm from 1981. Mine was a year older but less well equipped, although I definitely prefer my GLi’s velour upholstery and fabric roof. The Storm’s leather is a bit tryhard, and the wooden gearlever isn’t a patch on the golf ball mine had. Mechanically, they’re identical. The 1.6-litre fuel injected four cylinder was shared with the first Golf GTI, and developed 108bhp and 111lb ft, good for 109mph and 0–62mph in 8.8secs. Quicker than a Porsche 924, which may have had a little more power but was literally hundreds of kilos heavier than the 850kg Scirocco.

This one feels like it might still be good for that. Mine never was. Clutch slipped something rotten if it got more than half throttle in the low gears. Nevertheless, I remember it being a rocketship. It’s still pacy enough for modern traffic too, but the engine isn’t as zesty and sparky as I expected. It’s got decent torque and revs eagerly enough above 4,000rpm, but the engine sounds flat, thrashes round the dial rather than stirring the soul. 

I don’t find myself wanting one. I loved it when I had it, because it was special and different and was full of memories

In this, the engine matches the chassis. I’m not complaining about the slow steering or the bouncy, underdamped ride because that’s to be expected of a car that’s now nearly 45 years old, but the lack of basic vitality and eagerness doesn’t become it. The Scirocco doesn’t feel like a car that wants to have fun. It endures corners and doesn’t dig in eagerly, feels a bit flat. The sweetest thing about it is the manual gearbox, which slips through the gate easily – even if it does largely operate on a diagonal.

Makes me wonder why everyone gets so worked up about the original Golf GTI. People are asking daft money, upwards of £15k, for those now. These are less, but tracking a good Scirocco down is hard. But more than that, I don’t find myself wanting one. I loved it when I had it, because it was special and different and was full of memories.

I look at this one and appreciate how neatly designed and packaged it is, but rather than pining for it, I just find myself regretting how I failed to look after mine. You know how it is, I was just another mechanically clueless teenager trying to figure out how to keep a car running on financial fumes. A hero? Only sentimentally.