Born in a VW 1303S Beetle: Don’s lifelong VW obsession

The term ‘lifelong love affair’ is almost never strictly accurate.

But Don Katuwawala’s enduring passion for Volkswagens really does stem from the day he was born.

It begins on October 19, 1973, when Don’s father was hustling his Volkswagen Beetle through north London as fast as he could, his heavily pregnant wife in the passenger seat.

But Don was in a hurry, and the little orange Bug became a makeshift delivery room on the streets of Barnet.

Born in a VW 1303S Beetle

“My father didn’t get to the hospital in time and I was delivered in the front footwell of a 1303S Beetle,” says Don. “I didn’t actually know this until years later when I got a job working for Volkswagen group. My mother said ‘it’s no coincidence, because you were born in a Beetle’.”

For the first five years of his life, Don rode in the 1303S Beetle, and he digs out an old photograph of him clutching a colour-matched Corgi replica alongside his father in front of his birthplace.

Just before his sixth birthday, his father switched from air-cooled to water-cooled, buying a Golf GLS in 1979.

“Dad would do a school run in the Beetle and then eventually the Golf,” he says. “I remember being a back-seat passenger in both cars and people looking at the cars at school. The big names growing up were Austin, Morris, Ford and Vauxhall, and the Volkswagens were a little bit different.”

Five VW Golfs, two VW Polos, one very understanding wife

More than four decades on, and Don has five Golfs and two Polos, and one very understanding wife.

When her husband secretly bought Golf number four in 2016, a £34,000 Clubsport S no less, Ruwani Katuwawala could have been forgiven for saying ‘enough’s enough’.

“She looked like she was going to kill me,” says Don at his home near Bedford, where the two-seater Clubsport shares a garage with a Mk6 Edition 35 GTi.

A Mk2 GTi 16V, Don’s first car, sits on the drive, while a Mk1 is away undergoing restoration and a Mk3 resides at the Vindis dealership as the father-of-two’s private courtesy car.

Add in the two Polos, and it all gets rather crowded.

VW Golf GTI Clubsport S could “wreck my marriage”

Don feared the arrival of the Clubsport would “wreck my marriage”, that his VW obsession had gone a step too far, but Ruwani fairly quickly came round to the charms of the fastest Golf yet.

We’re sitting in Don’s garden on a hot summer day, his sons Seth and Neth playing nearby, the cars safely back under their covers after our photoshoot.

So how did it come to this?

Don grew up in a “united nations” community, his parents moving to England from Sri Lanka in the 1960s, taking up nursing jobs and living on-site in accommodation at a mental health hospital at Harperbury in Radlett.

His neighbours in the hospital quarters had come from all over the world for work, from India, Italy and Spain, to Sri Lanka, Poland and France, with many nationals remaining loyal to their home countries’ car-makers.

“One very patriotic Italian had an Alfa Romeo Spider, while a man of Mauritian descent (a former French colony) had a Citroen CX Pallas – it was like riding to school in a spaceship,” says Don, who grew up with the virtues of the cars from Wolfsburg drummed into him.

“Friends of my dad’s – I called them uncles – were mechanics and always held Volkswagens in high regard. They said the only way to break them was to crash them or neglect them.”

After leaving school, Don moved with his family to London Colney, and had a number of unsatisfactory jobs before studying mechanical engineering as a mature student at the University of Hertfordshire.

He was 25 and had never owned his own car, something he was keen to rectify, against the wishes of his father.

My dad told me to “get the Golf”

“He said ‘don’t get credit cards and don’t get student loans’,” says Don. “I had been deciding between a Peugeot 205 1.9 GTi and a Golf 16v GTi, and my father said ‘don’t get a car, but if you are going to, get the Golf’.

“So I took out a student loan and spent it all on a Golf GTi!”

It was May 1999, and the cricket World Cup was taking place in England.

“I was at Headingley and came back to the car park and saw the Golf,” says Don. “I waited and waited until the owner came up to collect it. I thought ‘he’s a Sri Lankan, this should be easy’. He said politely ‘could you please go, I’m not selling the car’.

“All the Golfs I’d seen had been mistreated or modified. It was difficult to find a minter, but this one was unmolested.

“Three months later, I was going to a Sri Lankan wedding in London and he was there. I was invited by the family of the bride, him by the family of the groom.

The 1989 black VW Golf GTI is the car closest to Don’s heart

“He was a bit drunk, and I approached him again. He said ‘yes, OK, I will sell it to you’. Once a Sri Lankan man says something, they are a man of their word, they won’t retract.

“When I went to collect it he said ‘you took advantage of me because I was drunk’, but he sold it to me for £3,500.”

The 1989 black GTi has now covered more than 187,000 miles, and is the car closest to Don’s heart.

“I went through a lot of ups and downs, and through it all that car was a constant,” he says. “When the chips were down, it put a smile on my face. That car kept me sane, and I would never get rid of it.

“There was a Volkswagen ad at the time – ‘if only everything in life was as reliable as a VW’ – and that sums that car up.”

After university, Don worked in the lubrications division of Magnetti Marelli, driving Fiat group cars (except Ferraris) around Millbrook at high speed to measure the wear and tear on conrods, piston rings etc.

A job at Volkswagen Group followed, working with dealers across the country, but when he was made redundant he contacted Vindis in Bedford, where he now lived with Ruwani, asking for work.

“I will clean your toilets”

“I called up the dealer principle and said ‘I’m not proud, I will clean your toilets’,” he says. “He said ‘come and see me in the morning’, and I worked there as a warranty controller for a year before getting a job for Ford Research at Dunton, which got me back into what I wanted to do.”

Despite describing working for Ford as “like Superman working in a Kryptonite mine”, it proved a useful stepping stone towards a job as an integration engineer at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), where he remains today.

While he was at Ford, commuting from Bedford to Essex and back in the Mk2 Golf – nicknamed GerTie – Ruwani took pity on Don and urged him to go and buy a newer car.

Vindis did a good deal on a 2008 Polo 1.4TDi, which took the strain of those long commutes, but the lure of a new Golf dragged Don back to the dealership once he’d settled into his new job at JLR.

“Seth was one year old, and I said to my missus, ‘look, I’ve been working quite hard for a year, I want to buy a new Golf GTi’,” says Don.

“She said ‘there’s three of us now, so as long as it’s got five doors, knock yourself out’. I thought ‘terrific’.”

Don placed the order for a five-door Mk6 Edition 35 GTi on a Saturday, but spotted a three-door version drive by on the way out of the showroom.

“I thought ‘that looks nice with the curved c-pillar’, so I changed the order to a three door.”

When the car was delivered March 2012, Ruwani quickly spotted the absence of rear doors.

“I said ‘oh no, there must have been a mis-build’. She wasn’t too happy, but she loved the car,” says Don.

Within three months of buying the Mk6, a third GTi was added to the collection, a 1981, W-registered Mk1, another car the long-suffering Ruwani was kept in the dark about.

“A chap phoned me up saying he was given my number because I liked Golfs,” says Don. “It was an early GTi, but it was badly fire damaged. I paid the amount it cost to hire a guy to piggyback it on his truck to my flat.

“The engine was a plastic congealed mess. In my right mind I should not have taken it on. It’s needed a lot of parts and it’s been a slow process. I bought it in June 2012 and it took until November or December 2018 to get it running, and it’s not finished yet.”

Fast forward to the Woertherseetreffen VW festival in Austria in May 2016, and Don catching a glimpse of the Golf GTi Clubsport S, the fastest front-wheel-drive car to go round the Nurburgring.

Only 400 of the 306bhp Golf were to be made, with 150 out of 200 right hand drive examples destined for the UK.

“It was the first time it had been on show, and it had the time it had done at the Nordschleife on the bonnet,” he says.

Getting his hands on “one of the greatest Golfs” ever made

“It had no rear seats and I thought ‘wow, this is serious’. We left the show early, me and my friend, came back to England and walked into Vindis.

“I placed my order in early May 2016, and didn’t hear from them until December – I had totally forgotten about it until I had a phone call from a salesman saying your car’s arrived. They sent a video of it coming off the transporter. This was December 23, 2016. My wife didn’t know, and I thought ‘oh shit’.

“I asked them: ‘Can I back out of this?’ Even though it was one of the greatest Golfs, I thought if I bring it home it will destroy my marriage.”

Don was told he couldn’t back out, so he went home and tried to enjoy Christmas, ignoring emails and phone calls until after the New Year.

Finally, there was no putting it off any longer, and a truck was organised to deliver the car on Saturday, January 7.

“My wife was pregnant with Neth by then, and she’s lying on the sofa when this big truck pulled up at the house,” says Don.

“She didn’t once get up and look out the window.”

“I felt bad guilt that I’d bought another car”

With the Clubsport S hidden away in the garage and Ruwani in blissful ignorance, a guilt-riddled Don took the family shopping while he worked out how to break the news.

“I felt bad guilt that I’d bought another car,” he remembers, opening the garage door on their return from the shops.

“She looked at the car, looked at me and had that look that my mum used to give when she was really vexed.

“She just shouted at me, ‘I can’t believe you!’ I felt small. My saving grace was that I was getting on a plane Monday morning to go to Denver for a Jaguar test trip for two or three weeks.

“She didn’t talk to me on the Sunday, and on Monday I said my goodbyes to the bump and to her. I just got a peck on the cheek.”

In his absence, Ruwani watched Sabine Schmitz and Rory Reid wax lyrical about the Clubsport S’s abilities round the Nurburgring on Top Gear, while a friend’s petrolhead husband told her it was a future classic and a good investment.

“When I got back she was a different person,” says a relieved Don.

Rather than quit while he was ahead, Don wasn’t finished collecting Golfs, although the Mk3 GTi that completed the five-car set was more or less dumped on him.

“A friend, Brian, called me before Christmas 2018, and said his father in law’s getting rid of his Golf,” he says. “He said ‘it’s too good for him to scrap it and I’m going to give it to you’. I said ‘I haven’t got room for it!’

Another Golf to add to his collection

“He’s a top DJ in Ibiza and he asked me if I would drop him at London City Airport on New Year’s Day.

“He’d driven the Golf down to Bedford from Liverpool, and I got up at silly o’clock, 4.30am, and took him to the airport in it on New Year’s Day, and then drove home in it.

“He wanted £600 for it but I still haven’t paid him and he hasn’t asked for it!”

With so many VWs, including a second Polo bought new in 2013, Don is always in and out of Vindis, Bedford for servicing and MOTs, so the Mk3 lives there for his personal use.

“They used to run a free taxi service but they don’t now, and it’s £10 each way, so that’s my taxi car,” he says. “It just goes back and forth to Vindis. They’ve treated me very well as a customer.”

In his jobs in the motor industry, Don has driven pretty much every premium brand car there is, but the boy born in a Bug will never turn his back on his beloved Volkswagens.

“I am stubbornly loyal to Volkswagen,” he says. “It all stems from the Mk2. If it’s a nice day that’s the one I’ll take out, because it puts the biggest grin on my face.”