Victor Tomlin vividly remembers the day he bought his GT Beetle, which was rare back in 1975 and is even more so now.
He was driving a “terrible” Jensen-Healey sports car down Romford Road in his native Forest Gate when he spotted the lemon yellow Beetle in a secondhand car lot.
“I’d wanted a Beetle ever since I got a lift in a friend’s really nice one a couple of years before,” says Victor, who was desperate to get rid of the Jensen.
“Worst trade-in ever”
“I had a new Austin-Healey Sprite and I traded that in for the Jensen-Healey – the worst trade-in ever. I was cursed with oil coming out of the rocker covers, the exhaust broke in half, it leaked like a sieve through the roof, and it drank petrol.”
Victor first tried his luck at Dovercourt, the Volkswagen main dealer in Plaistow, which stocked a large selection of Beetles.
“I said ‘I’ve got this to part exchange’, but they wouldn’t take it,” he remembers, heading off to other showrooms in east London. “I saw this one, the price was right at £995, and they agreed to take the Jensen-Healey.
“I was a burglar alarm engineer at the time, and I always remember I was doing a private job for my mate and my cut was £80, which was what it cost on top of the trade-in. So ‘bang’, I handed it over and I was away down the road as fast as I could!”
Yellow VW GT Beetle has been sold and swapped and then returned
Since then, Victor has sold the car once and bought it back, and swapped it for his late father’s BMW 1502 before once again reclaiming it in the mid 1990s.
“It’s a car that’s just stayed with me for some reason,” he says. “A lot of the time people get something and sell it to buy something better, which is a bit of a shame.
“I say I’m not emotionally attached to it, but I probably am. I remember picking up my daughter from the hospital in it when she was born in 1978.”
- Victor and family with the Beetle in the ’80s
Victor, now 74, first hit the road at 16 on a 250cc Ariel Arrow, before passing his driving test the following year and getting a secondhand Austin-Healey Sprite.
A Ford Anglia (“terrible”) followed, then a few Minis, a Triumph GT6 (“a lovely car”), the brand new Sprite, and the cursed, Lotus-powered Jensen-Healey – before the hunt began for a Beetle.
He didn’t go looking for a GT, but fate was clearly smiling on him that day in 1975 when he picked up one of just 2,500 examples, mostly built in November 1972 at VW’s Brussels plant.
Lemon yellow GT celebrates importation of Britain’s 300,000th Beetle
The GT, painted either lemon yellow, apple green or tomato red, was created to celebrate the importation of Britain’s 300,000th Beetle.
Based on the 1300S, the GT was fitted with a 1584cc engine mated to an uprated gearbox, giving a top speed of a shade over 80mph – quicker in a straight line than the heavier 1302S Super Beetle.
Other features included steel wheels, a padded dashboard, front disc brakes, a larger rear light cluster, a tunnel tray, and a sports gear shift – all for an extra £19 over the standard 1300.
It also has the distinction of being the only classic Beetle to be badged as a ‘Beetle’ – as long as you requested the special ‘GT Beetle’ badge available from British dealers.
When Victor first bought the then two-year-old car, one of his first acts was to buy a Waxoyl kit from Halfords, which he credits for the car’s continuing lack of rust.
“You’d buy a kit with a hose, drill a hole in the scuttle and spray it in there,” he says. “It leaked for weeks afterwards through the joins. But I swear that’s the only reason it survived, because it was kept outside for years.”
Selling the yellow GT Beetle to a friend
The Beetle was used regularly until Victor sold it to a friend from work for £850.
“I used that as a deposit for my first house, but then a little while later I wanted to buy another one,” he says.
“My mate said to me ‘you can have your one back if you want’, so I paid him £2,000 to get it back. The price was all right because he’d had it resprayed and had a new engine put in as well. “All these bits and pieces cost me dear when I came to get it back.”
Victor drove the Beetle for another 10 years or so before he came to an arrangement with his father to swap cars.
“Like me, he just wanted that Beetle,” he says, “and his BMW was a nice one, so I agreed to it. The Beetle was parked outside his house in Dagenham, and I was there every week, saying ‘you haven’t cleaned the car dad’.
“Eventually, God forbid, my dad died. He lived with my step mum, and the car disappeared. I thought ‘oh no, she’s sold it’, because people used to knock on the door and ask to buy it.
“I went round there one day and said ‘what’s happened to my car?’ She said ‘I’ve put it in a garage for you, Victor, when you want to pick it up just come and get it’.”
Rescuing the VW GT Beetle
And so, finally, he did, rescuing the GT from its lock-up sometime around 1994.
“It was absolutely terrible, because the garage she put it in was damp,” he says. “I couldn’t get the bonnet open for a while. But when I got it out of the garage, I put the key in, turned the key and all the lights lit up.
“I thought ‘well that’s something’. But then it started up first time, ‘broom’! You wouldn’t believe it. I reckon he’d put in a new battery.”
Victor travelled backwards and forwards between the Beetle’s resting place in Dagenham and his home near Canterbury preparing it for its journey home, including fitting a new set of tyres.
“I got it insured, drove it down the A13 and dead opposite Fords was the MOT place,” he says. “I just wanted to get it down there to find out what I needed to do to it. The discs were rusted up, but by driving it down the road it all cleared up, and it passed its MOT. I couldn’t believe it.”
Once again, the Beetle was Victor’s daily driver, used for work and taken to car shows at places like Sandown Park.
Somewhere along the way, his father had got rid of the original wheels – “what did he do that for?” – so Victor set out to find some.
Finding Cosmic wheels for the GT Beetle
“I went to see some in a place in Chiswick but these wheels were sprayed terribly,” he says, “but in the corner was a Cosmic wheel.
“I said ‘have you got the rest?’ and he said ‘yeah, but I don’t know where they are’. It took me half a day to find three others. It took me two years to find a fifth one, at Sandown, but the funny thing is it doesn’t fit where the spare wheel goes. I didn’t want to cut anything to make it fit, so it’s sitting in the garage.”
After a while, Victor got a company car and the Beetle was little used, but that didn’t stop him making small modifications to the GT, like re-covering the seats and installing a Gene Berg quick-shifter.
But that isn’t the half of it – there are now disc brakes all round; upgraded front and rear anti-roll bars; a new, larger oil cooler (“a work of art”); a racing oil filter; another respray; all-new chromework; and a bespoke, 2109cc engine.
Victor came to a slightly unconventional arrangement for the respray, finding a large garage which gave him a corner of their workshop to take the car apart.
“I had this little space, and I used to go over there of an evening and gradually take it apart or do bits of work,” he says. “I ripped out all the carpets, and one of the workers who had some spare time sorted a bit of rust that was coming through.
“As part of the deal he said he’d put it back together. I went over there one day and he said ‘I’ve sprayed the car’. I said ‘oh great, I can drive it home’, but he said it was all in bits.
“I said ‘you said you were going to put it all back together’. ‘Did i?’ I ended up putting it all back together myself. All told it cost me £850.”
Upgrading the GT Beetle’s engine
Next came the engine, built about seven years ago when Victor became worried about the valves in the existing unit.
“It played on my mind, so I went everywhere to get prices and see what I could get,” he says, finally commissioning Richard Morena from Chelmsford to do the work.
Rather than plump for a straight swap with another standard unit, Victor went for something a little more racy – at a total cost exceeding £3,500.
Among the goodies on the 2109cc unit – built around a rebored engine from Brazil – are an Engle 120 camshaft, CB performance cam followers, Kennedy racing clutch, Mahle forged pistons, and twin Weber carbs.
The car now goes like a ‘GT’ should, and makes a distinctive throaty roar.
“If everything blows up I’ll have an original engine put back in it,” Victor laughs, before admitting he hasn’t used the car that much in recent years.
“I decided recently, what with Covid, that I wanted something to do, so I’ve been working on it doing bits and pieces. I went out one summer and it got a bit hot, so I’ve put an oil cooler on it with an electric fan, which is quite a job to do.”
Victor is pretty sure the car will be with him for some time to come, though he has long hankered after a convertible.
“I’ve always wanted one, but a few times I’d go and look at one and they were terrible,” he says. “I went to look at one past Haymarket in London and they said it had all been done. It looked lovely, but there were things like RSJs underneath holding it together.
“They were a lovely couple, but what could you say? Someone terrible has done that to them.”
Victor’s GT Beetle, on the other hand, stands as a pristine example of his attention to detail and passion for a car that means so much.
