This is a Volkswagen Beetle like no other – a 600bhp, turbo-charged rallycross monster that will hit 60mph in under three seconds on its way to 145mph.
But it’s also much more than that to Paul Harrold and his son James, who races the car in Retro Rallycross in honour of Paul’s late brother Peter.
The brothers built the car together after buying it as an accident-damaged shell in 1979, with Peter campaigning it in the British Rallycross Championships well into the ‘90s.
After his untimely death in 2003, the car lay idle until the idea of a retro series was mooted in 2010, which prompted Paul and James to recommission the mighty Beetle.
Retro champion
In James’ hands, the car won the retro championship in 2018, eight rounds from Lydden Hill – the sport’s birthplace – in the south to Knock Hill in Scotland.
“We’ve got no intention of getting rid of the car – we regard it as a bit of a family heirloom,” says Paul, 74. “It’s got a bit of my brother in it, a bit of me, and it’s just something we’ve been used to working on for such a long time. It would be very difficult to see it outside the family.”
Peter first started competing in autocross with a friend in a Beetle in the mid 1960s, before Paul got involved to share the costs when his older brother’s friend dropped out.
“We did autocross together, sharing the driving, for about five or six years, and then we switched to rallycross, which was a bit more exciting because there was a bit of tarmac involved, not just a field with cones on it,” says Paul.
“With rallycross, you could only have one driver, so I stepped back but still helped with the car.”
Rallycross was the invention of Robert Reed, the producer of ITV’s World of Sport programme, who came up with a TV-friendly series of short, sharp, action-packed races around a part tarmac, part dirt or turf circuit.
The birth of rallycross
The first meeting was held at Lydden Hill in Kent on February 4, 1967, and it quickly became a staple of Saturday afternoon sports broadcasting.
The Harrold brothers went through three Beetles – one of which caught fire on the trailer on the way to an event – before buying the 1973 1303S, a rolling shell that became “the ultimate rallycross Beetle”, according to VW aficionado and author Keith Seume.
“Beetles varied slightly in terms of how the suspension was set up,” says Paul. “This was the latest one VW produced, with independent suspension all round. The early ones had torsion bars at the back and cross torsion bars at the front, and they were OK but they didn’t handle as well.
“So it was a question of updating them as and when we could afford to, and when the right body shells became available.”
In its early incarnations, the Beetle wasn’t quite the monster it is today.
“The first engine in this car was normally aspirated, and then we progressed to a conventional VW engine with a turbo charger,” says Paul, with the regulations stating you had to maintain the original engine block for the car.
“In those days what people were doing – certainly the Scandanavians, who were quite heavily into rallycross – was using a Beetle block with Porsche heads on it to increase the power output and make it more reliable.”
Subaru Legacy heads
But Peter and Trevor Chinn, of Lotus Engineering, had other ideas, and that’s when things got very interesting.
“This was when the Subaru Legacy was used in rallying,” says Paul, with Colin McRae winning back-to-back British titles in 1991 and 1992 in the car. “And Trevor discovered that there was only a 1mm difference in the bore centres of the Legacy and the Beetle.
“He worked out you could fit Subaru heads to a Beetle case. The big advantage was they would be water cooled, and the problem with an air-cooled engine is that if you put too much turbo boost into it, it gets very hot and the engine becomes unreliable.
“If you can cool the cylinder heads by water rather than air, it makes it a much more reliable engine, plus you get 16 valves rather than eight, and two overhead camshafts as well.
“It was quite an involved thing to fit then, but Trevor is a very clever chap – he had the knowledge and the skills to help us do it.
“So rather than going to a Porsche head, we went to modified Subaru cylinder heads, and that’s the engine in there now.”
“Most advanced Beetle engine”
Automotive journalist and rally enthusiast Peter Noad described a “unique power unit, probably the most advanced Beetle engine ever built anywhere in the world”.
“As far as I know, no-one has ever fitted water-cooled cylinder heads before or since, so in that respect it probably is quite advanced,” says Paul, “but some of the Beetle engines used in drag racing are getting quite sophisticated.”
By this point, the Beetle was running a four-wheel-drive system using a modified Porsche gearbox, but “they kept breaking and we just ran out of gearboxes”.
“It was much easier to drive on four wheels, but it got too expensive, so we converted it back to two-wheel-drive in about 1996,” says Paul. “Bear in mind we were competing against things like the Metro 6R4 and Audi Quattros in those days.
“The class we were in, Peter was up against a lot of serious stuff, so he was never successful in the British Rallycross Championship, but he had an outright win at Lydden in a club round.
“It didn’t help when they brought in weight restrictions, which affected our performance.”
James caught racing bug
Peter campaigned the car until about 1998, by which time his nephew James had caught the racing bug.
“The Beetle got pushed to the back of the workshop, mothballed to some extent,” says Paul, “and Peter helped to build my son’s Peugeot 205 GTi stock hatch rallycross car.
“He started racing that in 2002 and he was pretty quick – he won the British championship in 2003.”
Peter’s death the same year was a hammer blow for the family, and Paul and James sold the Peugeot to someone in Ireland.
“We now regret selling it – we wish we’d kept it, but we had a few years off racing then,” says Paul.
For more than a decade, the Beetle remained mothballed, with his wife Valda unsure what to do with it.
“She said to me ‘I’ll probably sell it’, and I said ‘no, Peter wouldn’t want you to sell it, he’d want to see it being used’,” remembers Paul. “If it had been sold it would have been broken up, people would have bought it for the parts.”
The birth of Retro Rallycross, for cars that raced in the original series up to 1991, presented an incentive, and a significant challenge.
With Valda’s blessing, Paul got the car over to his place and got it running.
“We ran it up and down an airfield runway, and everything seemed to work, but then we had a few problems with it and had to take the engine out,” he says.
Engine stripdown and rebuild
“We thought that rather than trying to get it to work as it was, we’d strip it down and rebuild it to try to get it right.
“I’m forever grateful to Trevor. He used to come over every night from work for probably a couple of months and he went through the whole thing with me.
“He wrote it all down so I knew exactly how the engine had been built and what to be careful of. There was no YouTube in those days – you had to find a book or somebody who knew what they were doing.
“He taught me a lot, and the rest of it was just picking it up as you go along and having learned from Peter in the early days.”
The regulations state that the car has to be run in roughly the same specification it was prior to 1991, but there is scope for some improvements.
“The big change was that when the engine was first built electronic injection was not popular,” says Paul, “so it was built with a mechanical injection pump driven off the crankshaft, and when the turbo boost came in it turned the injection pump to richen the mixture.
“A lot of the turbo cars were using that sort of system, and it was like that until 2017. It was OK, but the controls you have on the engine in the mixture and the spark are not particularly sophisticated and we were worrying the engine might be damaged.
“As it’s such a sophisticated engine I couldn’t afford to rebuild it if it got too badly damaged, so we put a Motec electronic injection system on it that runs the fuel and the spark and everything else.”
An eye-watering 612bhp
Apart from some new cylinders and pistons, the 2.1-litre Beetle engine – bored out from its original 1.6-litres – is little changed from when it was first built, with a beefy Garrett turbo pushing output to an eye-watering 612bhp.
The car was ready for a retro rallycross open day at Lydden Hill in 2012, a test event to see if there was appetite for a fully fledged championship. There very much was.
James competes in the two-wheel-drive Super Retro class, for vehicles over 1600cc, against – among others – a Lancia Stratos, Porsche 911 Turbo, and various Escorts and BMWs.
He won the British title in 2018 to add to his earlier stock hatch crown, a proud and emotional moment for the whole family.
“I get a lot of pleasure out of preparing it and then seeing James drive it, because he is pretty rapid,” says Paul. “Peter’s son, Michael, and daughter, Janine, come and see it race, and she loves the car and the fact it’s still being used – I think she gets a big kick out of that.
“That’s what Peter would have wanted too – he wouldn’t have wanted it mothballed or sold and broken up.
“We all describe it as Peter’s car, and everybody knows it as his car, so it’s nice for the family to see it still being used.”
Extraordinary Beetle
As for driving this most extraordinary of Beetles, Paul admits it’s a bit of a handful.
“I’ve driven it in testing at various places, in particular at Blyton, near Lincoln, and I don’t like it,” he smiles. “Even my son doesn’t like it very much, to be honest, because it’s such a beast.
“You’ve got an awful lot of power from a car where the engine is hanging out the back.
“James takes me out in it when we go to Blyton, and it’s a scary thing to be in. If you’ve built the car as we have, you know what you’ve put into it and it’s even more frightening then – how does the stuff I’ve done actually survive, you know? All the things that could go wrong.”
Even former F1 star Jenson Button found the Beetle tricky to handle when he took it for a spin around Lydden as part of a BBC feature screened in the build-up to the 2015 Russian Grand Prix.
Button’s late father John, also in a Beetle, raced against Peter in rallycross, and watching him inspired the future world champion to take up karting.
His father’s Beetle had a ‘mere’ 200bhp, and Button marvelled at the sheer power, while at times struggling to select a gear, describing it as “the maddest thing I’ve ever done”.
Despite the meticulous preparation, things do sometimes go wrong, not least in November 2021 when a rear drive flange broke and a wheel flew off.
Back in serious action
“That put us back a bit, and we had to get some special drive flanges made up out of special material that was strong enough,” says Paul, the Beetle not in serious action until the first round of the British championship at Lydden over the Easter weekend nearly 18 months later.
“We had a great day…until the final. James was fastest in Q1, 2nd in Q2, fastest in Q3 and fastest in the two semi finals. He therefore started on pole for the final and was leading with two laps to go when a rear suspension problem forced him to retire. Gutted sums it up!”
The Harrolds are not planning to compete in every round of the championship this year, but are likely to return to the Kent circuit in July for the British round of the all-electric World Rallycross Championship.
Instead, they will enter the car into festival events at Goodwood and Firle Beacon.
“They’re quite nice events, weekend things where the family can come along,” says Paul. “It’s a big thing to do the championship seriously over all eight rounds.
“James is busy, and there’s quite a bit of work involved keeping the thing running, and quite a lot of expense. We’ve done that and now we’ll slow down a little bit, semi-retire it, but not totally.
“Tyres are expensive, and you need two sets to complete an event, certainly on the back, at £300 apiece.
“They’re very soft, because you need up to temperature straight away for a three-lap race, but because of that you chew through them.”
While the bright yellow Bug will be slowing down for now, could there be another chapter in the Harrold rallycross story in the shape of James’ son William?
“He might be interested, who’s to say?” smiles Paul. “He’s only 10…”
