Ady Muttitt had been storing his daughter Letitia’s first car, a 1982 Volkswagen Polo ‘breadvan’, for years, half forgotten and surrounded by weeds in his garden.
But sometime in 2022, Letitia’s partner Ian hatched a plan to resurrect ‘Minty’ – as she had called it – and give it to her as a Christmas present.
Ady and Ian hoped for a quick and cheap recommission, retaining the car’s patina but making sure it was safe, and running nicely.
“And that,” says Ady, “is when the issues really started.”
Not only are we now well past Christmas, but Letitia’s 40th birthday in April proved another deadline missed as parts for the Polo were, in some cases, impossible to find.
Budget buster
Not only that, but the original £500 budget has been well and truly exceeded.
“I’m not going to say how much, but we’re into the thousands,” says Ady, perhaps only half-joking when he adds that he’d “like to take it to a scrapyard and say ‘make it into a cube so I can dance round the bastard’.”
Even Paul Kennedy, of Evolve Classic Restorations, who has been working on the car, says he’d “think twice about doing another one”.
“I thought finding parts would be easy,” he adds, “and it’s been a bit of a shock to me, a real learning curve.
“When Ady asked me to look at it for him we were so busy, I wanted a job that I could fit around other stuff, but to be honest it’s been a bit of a nightmare.”
Minty came into the family’s life when Ady saw it up for sale at his local weekly auction in 2000.
“I just happened to notice it because they never sold cars – it wasn’t a car auction,” he says, “they sold deadstock and bits of wood for your garden.
“It looked all right, but I didn’t buy it there and then. About six months later I saw it advertised in a shop window and I asked a friend if he’d like to come and have a look at it with me, because he worked at Lotus as an engineer and knew more about cars than I do.
“It seemed sound, I loaned Letitia the £300 it cost and she did pay me back, which was rather good of her.”
Innovative ‘breadvan’ Polo
The ‘breadvan’ Polo was something of an innovator when it was introduced in late 1981, bringing a useful estate shape to the supermini market.
It sold well alongside the more conventional hatchback, known as the Coupe, and Derby saloon versions, bringing a new dimension in small car load carrying.
Minty, a blue 1093cc CL version with distinctive blue and white chequered seats, served Letitia well going to and from a summer job at a design engineering company and then while she studied for a degree, and then a masters, in mechanical engineering at the University of Warwick.
“It was a reliable car,” says Ady, “I never had a phone call saying ‘dad, can you come and help me?’.
“She didn’t take it to university when she was in halls for the first year, but then she did in the second year when she had a shared house – a student tip as I called it – in Leamington Spa, so it used to sit outside there.
“It was there that some bright spark decided he would take a shine to her classic iPod, which she’d left on the seat. He was quite a caring sort of thief, because he just put a screwdriver down the side of the driver’s door – he didn’t smash the window – and flipped the lock.
“It’s a shame, because the iPod would probably be worth more than the car is now.”
The thief did leave a mark just above the door handle, and it was never repaired at the time.
VW Polo patina
“I said to Paul, ‘can you repair it?’ and he said ‘well, you’re best to leave everything as it is, we’ll just do the bare minimum and buff the car up’.
“The trend now is to not actually repair things. The more scratched and knocked about it is, it’s all about the patina and the history of the object. So that mark is a part of the car’s history – and a permanent reminder to not leave things on the seat.”
After graduating from her masters degree, Letitia brought the Polo home to Norfolk and headed off to London to work for a major investment bank.
The car resided for many years in Ady’s mother’s garage, and was given a new cambelt before lying dormant under a cloth in the dry.
“Then about four years ago my mum died and we had to clear the house, so we lost the garage,” says Ady, 75. “At the time, my garages were full – one of them with an MGB and one of them with a Morris Minor 1000 in bits that my wife has had for about 30 years and is at the stage of ‘well, I will get round to it’.
“So it had to sit outside in the garden, which is unfortunate. Then the caravan got parked in front of it, so it was sort of out of view, and there it sat and the weeds grew round it.
“Every year at this time I’d spray the weeds, then I thought it would be better if I started the thing, so I put a couple of gallons of petrol in it, put a new battery in and wound it over, but it decided ‘no, I don’t want to wake up yet’, so I lost interest in it after a little while.”
Was there ever a point when Ady thought it was better just to sell the car and be done with it?
Attached to Minty
“No, because it wasn’t mine,” he says. “It just didn’t come on the radar that it needed to be sold. “A couple of times I said to Letitia, ‘what are you going to do about that bloody old car?’ but she never really answered and what I got from that was – a bit like her old man – she had probably got attached to it.
“Just like the Morris Minor, which I really should get rid of, but I’m attached to it because the kids used to go in it.”
Then came Ian’s bright idea, when he said one day: “What are you going to do with that old car?”
Initially, the plan was to trailer the Polo to St Albans, near where Ian and Letitia live, for the recommissioning.
“But the number they wanted just to look at it was more than the car’s worth,” says Ady. “They did also try to sell me a Ferrari Dino at the same time. While I’ve always liked Ferrari Dinos, my bank manager wouldn’t have liked the £300,000 I’d have been relieved of.”
That’s how the car ended up closer to home, with Paul at Evolve but, says Ady, “it hasn’t been a quick little recommission, it’s been a pain in the arse”.
“And the reason is, Mr Volkswagen appears to have destroyed every single item when they stopped manufacturing it,” he adds. “The modern term is ‘we don’t support it anymore’.
“Looking for bits for this car has been a journey which I don’t really want to take anymore.
“I had hoped that the tank would need a flush out, new battery, new set of tyres, and a buff up and that would be it. But it didn’t work out like that.”
So what work has needed to be done, and why has it proved so infuriating?
Problem one was the fuel tank, which Ady had hoped would just need a flush through. Not so.
“The first time we took it out for a test drive, it conked out down the road, and that was when we realised the fuel tank had a problem,” says Paul, chatting at his workshop. “It ran fine, but we got about 200 yards. The tank had been sludged up and we’d cleaned it out as best we could, but it had corroded badly and was leaking.”
Ady scoured the internet for the correct tank, and finally found one that was made in Taiwan.
Ill-fitting fuel tank
“I told Paul that the tank was for this car, but when he tried to offer it up it didn’t fit,” he says. “We found out the handbrake mechanism is in a different position on that car to the saloon, so that meant the tank was too big.
“So I got the tank cut shorter and welded up via an old marine engineering mate called Rowley from Lowestoft.
“Then you find the new tank has a filler pipe that doesn’t fit the aperture on the old tank, so we had to source a piece of fuel pipe that would fit both orifices. It was just time and aggravation sorting it all out.
“Finally, it seems the tank’s sender unit is no good – and we can’t get one anywhere.”
“I did a Golf a few years ago and you can buy anything for a Golf – but they don’t seem to share many parts,” says Paul. “You’d think a sender unit from a Golf would fit in that tank, but there’s no cross reference with anything else and all the people I tried said I can’t get a sender unit for it.”
On to the brakes, and there was partial success, the rear wheel cylinder and shoes, and all the discs proving easy to find. Not so the front callipers and brake master cylinder.
“We couldn’t get the callipers anywhere, so we ended up sending them away to Bigg Red to be re-done,” says Paul.
“All this is added to my personal expenditure,” says Ady, “and then we had a problem finding the brake master cylinder.”
The unit was sent to Past Parts in Bury St Edmunds, who source their sleeving from Perth, Australia.
“This was Christmas time, and I rang up in the first week in January asking if it’s ready yet, and he said ‘no, the firm we use in Australia closes for the whole month of January’,” says Paul. “I was amazed we couldn’t get a master cylinder easily to be honest.”
Nonetheless, these problems were solved. Less so the problematic carburettor.
The rubber carb flange, which “had decided it wasn’t going to be rubber anymore”, was sourced online for £13, though Ady guards against hasty purchases, having seen the same thing advertised in Asia for £213.
Carburettor headache
The carb itself has been another headache, with a long, fruitless search for a carb rebuild kit.
“It played up when we took it for an MoT, but I think it just brought a bit of shit up,” says Paul, “or it could be the carb itself, which probably needs a stripdown and rebuild. The trouble is, I couldn’t risk taking it apart unless we could get a service kit for it, and I couldn’t find one anywhere.”
“Here we go again,” says Ady, “you search for a part and it doesn’t seem to exist, even though I know it does exist because one of the first things I bought was a Haynes Manual with all the part numbers listed.
“Somebody reading this will probably say that all these parts are shared with the Golf, but no-one told me!
“There are so many VW Golfs out there, and I can’t believe that VW have made every single part for that Polo as individual unique items – so somewhere, somebody knows the compatible items, which are probably lodged under the Golf brand. But how do you find them?
“The problem is that with cars of that generation, the knowledge is not there. You talk to a main dealer – the old guy who used to always have a wet roll up the same length in his mouth in the stores, is now a young kid with a laptop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the knowledge is not there.”
To keep costs down, Ady did the online legwork, and fetching and carrying, while Paul fitted the parts he sourced.
“I blew up two Apple Macs doing this I spent so much time online,” he smiles. “I was travelling backwards and forwards to get stuff – I can’t expect Paul to do that, there’s a time factor with his costs, so I trundled around, doing the spadework and the searching.
“I have to say, Paul’s been brilliant. Some people out there would have said ‘just take it away’. I’d recommend him to anybody – he’s the salt of the earth, and he can outswear me, which is good because not many people can.”
Polo running sweetly
For now, the Polo is running sweetly, but Ady will keep it and drive it around for a while before it moves to its permanent home in Hertfordshire.
“It’s running now, but whether it will last long we don’t know,” he says, “so the plan is for me to drive it to make sure it’s OK.
“I’m sure my daughter will love it – and it’ll have a large, nice warm garage. To her a car is a car, but I think she’s got a bit of an emotional connection to this.”
Paul adds: “It runs absolutely lovely – it’s only done 44,000 miles. But we’ve got to keep looking for a fuel tank sender unit.”
A few days after our interview, Ady gets in touch. It’s good news for the car, and bad news for his and Ian’s bank balance – they’ve sourced a fully rebuilt carburettor from Cats and Carbs UK.
But he’d still love any information on a reliable source for parts for the breadvan – leave a comment if you can help.
