“It’s the past, it’s the future, it’s everything.”
Judith Massey is waxing lyrical about her and husband David’s immaculate VW Golf GTi, a car they bought new in 1983 and will never sell.
“We’ve had people following us with cash, but it’s not for sale,” she says of the Golf that has been with them for their entire married life, and will one day pass to their petrolhead son Kieran.
The GTi was in regular use until 2007, when they bought a Mk5 Golf GTi Edition 30, one of a limited run of 1,500 cars.
‘Best crowd puller’
Since then the older car has been largely “retired” and used for shows, where it is regularly surrounded by admirers and has carried off numerous awards including ‘best crowd puller’ and ‘best story’.
“I think it’s because it has got a story that people get so interested in it,” says David, “rather than just a car that someone’s bought two years ago.”
It’s a story that started when the couple were weighing up what car to buy ahead of a move to work in Germany, where David would be installing radar test equipment for Tornado jet fighters.
Although a civilian, he got a Forces stamp in his passport, which gave him the opportunity to buy a new, tax-free car – as long as it was exported to Germany and stayed there for at least a year.
At the time, the couple were both Ford fans – Judith had a Mk2 Escort 1600 Sport and David had a Capri 1.6L and was hankering after a 2.8 Injection.
Tax-free savings
“If they were still being made, we’d have had an RS2000 without question, but then they brought out the front wheel drive XR3, which seemed like sacrilege,” says David, also looking at the BMW 3-series because of the huge tax-free savings.
But it was Judith’s experience of driving diesel Golfs while working as an engine oil lab technician for Shell, and the cost savings compared to a Capri or BMW, that tipped the balance in favour of the GTi.
“We had the very first diesel Golfs that were brought into the UK, and they were absolutely brilliant,” she says. “I think that totally convinced me that the Golf was one of the best cars, for normal people, around.
“We put a quarter of a million kilometres on these two left hand drive Golfs, and they were so reliable.”
And so they placed an order for a black, UK-spec Golf GTi through VW Export, paying £5,114 – or 20,456 Deutschmarks for export purposes – a full £2,000 less than they would have paid with taxes applied.
They picked the car up in May 1983, and Judith impressed her colleagues at Shell with this rapid hot hatch.
“The people I worked with were all car mad,” she says, “and when they went out in it they were all grinning from ear to ear – they all loved it, and I loved it, because it was fast.
Golf GTi one of the fastest cars around
“It was one the fastest cars around at the time – that normal people can afford anyway.”
The couple were married in June, and David headed with the Golf to Germany for an initial 18 months in July, the car switching to Forces plates.
Judith joined him in December, and the Golf was used as her runaround and for the pair’s weekend transport and holidays as David had a company VW Polo for commuting.
Driving in Germany was “fun”, he says: “I took it up to its maximum on one of the autobahns. It’s not built for top end speed, it was built to be quick to 60mph, and once you got over 80 it progressively got more interesting.
“But I got it up to an indicated 118mph, which is probably around 110mph in real life – but I only did that once. It’s happier at 80.”
The couple drove all over Europe in the GTi, including a memorable climb up all 2,576 metres of the Großglockner Pass in Austria.
It’s also been to Legoland in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, the famous Winterberg dams, and back to Austria, where the Golf had its first mishap.
“A deer jumped out of the roadside and ran straight into the side of the car,” says Judith. “It made quite a dent, so we had to have that fixed all those years ago at the local VW garage.
“It left a very slight crease on the door.”
Return to the UK
After 18 months based at Weeze in north west Germany, the couple returned with the car to the UK, where David got a job at RAF Honington.
The Golf was reunited with its original UK registration number, worn on plates with a red surround to denote its tax-free status.
With David getting another company car, a Ford Escort, the Golf effectively became Judith’s car, despite their initial intention to sell the Golf on returning home.
“The discount for the tax-free status would have covered the depreciation, and at the time a lot of people were going abroad to buy cars because they were so much cheaper,” says Judith.
“The trouble was, the European cars weren’t the same spec as the UK cars, which is partly how they kept the price down.
“That’s one of the reasons we bought a UK-spec car.”
When David’s job at Honington finished and he lost his company car, they bought a Morris Marina from Judith’s dad for £500 so they could keep the Golf as a second car.
“We moved to Burnley and then I had to go up to Scotland for work, so we still needed two cars,” says David. “The Marina was cheap motoring for four years, I put 50,000 miles on it and got £300 back when we sold it.”
They lived in East Lothian for a while, Judith using the Golf every day to go to college in Edinburgh, and then to Yeovil in Somerset in 1993.
Classic Golf GTi
By the time the car was about 15 years old, we started to realise the car was showing up in classic car magazines,” she says, “and we thought we might as well keep this, because we couldn’t justify changing it at the time.”
Having spent some more time as the main family car, with young son Kieran strapped into a car seat in the back, the GTi once again became a second car, but still used regularly for the next few years.
Twenty years of regular use took its toll, and rust started to show in all the usual places, so in 2004 the Golf was treated to a full rust treatment and windows-out respray in Fylde, Lancashire, the couple’s latest move around the UK.
“It had been used as a family car, so it had the usual car park dings, and bits of rust around the rear window, wheel arches, and tailgate edges, with the slight damage on the passenger door from the deer still visible,” says David. “It was getting tired, so it needed to be done.”
Only in 2006 did the Masseys take the car to its first show, joining the Golf Mk1 Owners’ Club and taking it to a Golf show in the car park at the British Motor Museum at Gaydon.
It was still being used for David’s four-mile commute to work, but was finally “retired” to become a full-time classic and show car the following year, when they decided to buy a Mk5 Golf GTi Edition 30, which they also still own.
Golf on For the Love of Cars
The Mk1 became a regular at car shows, and in 2015 it was selected to appear on Channel 4’s For the Love of Cars, presented by Ant Anstead and Philip Glenister.
“They wanted to show the GTi wasn’t just for boy racers and youngsters,” says David. “They wanted a family take on the car, and also a female owner.
“It was about showing that it could be a family car, and that dual purpose made it the groundbreaking car that it was.”
So the pair set off for filming in Ascot, with the presenters interviewing Judith about her ownership for a full five minutes.
“It was quite good fun,” she says. “Though they did get me to say I used to race at traffic lights, which I did. I was told not to give the keys to Philip Glenister, I’m not sure why…
“They ended the show with a photograph of Kieran, who was two at the time, sitting in the boot. He was not amused at that one – he was still at university at the time.”
Later that year, disaster struck when David was driving the Golf to the Manchester Classic Car Show at Event City, following Judith in another car.
“I was about to pull on to a roundabout to get on to the M55 – I rolled forward, but stopped because there was a car coming round,” he remembers. “I stopped and, bang, the van behind went into the back of me.
“The impact bent the rear bumper, and the van’s grille must have caught the push button on the tailgate and pulled it open, so there was a hump around the button and a ripple all along the back of the tailgate.”
In the immediate aftermath, it dawned on David just what the car meant to him.
“Genuinely upset”
“The guy in the van got away with his life,” he laughs, “but it was a realisation that I was genuinely upset.”
Returning home, the Golf returned to Carl Marsh, who had done the respray a dozen years earlier, and he told David the tailgate could be repaired, but not to perfection.
“He said ‘most people won’t see it, but every time you look at it, you’ll see it and it will annoy you forever more’,” he says. “So he persuaded me to get a replacement tailgate. He did a fantastic job – you couldn’t tell anything.
“But I kept the original tailgate in the garage just in case. And for some time I’d be at shows and people would ask ‘is it original?’
“I’d say ‘yeah, apart from the tailgate’, and every time I said that it hurt.”
A couple of years later, son Kieran put his parents on to The Carrosserie Company, based in Barnard Castle in County Durham and best-known for restoring Classic Rolls-Royces.
“They said ‘oh, we’ll get that out, you won’t be able to see it’,” says David, showing them the original, creased tailgate.
“Sure enough, you can’t see anything and it’s now on the car. So now it’s all original apart from the rear light cluster that was smashed in the crash, though I managed to get an original Hella, and a stainless steel exhaust. It’s even got the original clutch.”
Since the repair, the Golf has been used a little less, but still attends several shows a year, and is still used for holidays.
“We’ve got a car trailer now, and we took it down to the New Forest on holiday,” says Judith. “We didn’t want to put motorway miles on it, but we wanted to drive it when we got there. We found somewhere we could leave the trailer and took the car out on a daily basis, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The only problem was getting out of car parks when you’re there, because people come over to you.”
Golf mobbed at shows
It’s been a common theme in recent years, with the Golf regularly mobbed at shows and its mere presence even causing accidents on the road.
“Why they create such an impact with people I don’t know, but they just do,” says Judith. “We’ve taken photos of it being surrounded and you can’t see the car. People revere it, and you just talk all day and end up with very sore feet.”
“You can have a Ferrari or something at a show and people will walk past and look, but they won’t go up because they’re apprehensive – it’s not achievable,” adds David. “Walk past us and there are people around the car all the time.”
On the road, Judith had taken the car for an MoT in Blackpool, and stood agape as a van driver was distracted by the sight of the Golf.
“I watched this van coming along, and he ploughed into all these bollards on his left hand side because he was staring at the car,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.
“Another time we had the car on a trailer in a motorway queue and we were talking to people, having discussions along the motorway, and they were taking photos as they went past. It was surreal.”
David remembers another motorway excursion in slow-moving traffic, when “a Passat went past and he was looking round at us and ‘bang’ into the back of a Scooby, plastic everywhere.”
Pristine interior
Heading out for our photoshoot, we take a good look around the interior, which bears very little evidence of its life as a family car. How?
“It’s had baby seats in it, prams in it, and a very well-trained son,” smiles Judith. “He used to get in the back, take his shoes off and get into his seat.”
“It’s just been about not letting it get into a shabby state,” adds David, who is responsible for keeping the paintwork shiny.
As for the future, more shows are planned, as well as some longer trips now that David has retired.
“The plan is to go back to some of the places we went to in Europe and, this time, take some photographs,” he says.
“I’d like to take it back to Wolfsburg at some stage,” says Judith. “It just seems correct to do that, to take it home to where it was created.”
One day, the couple are fairly sure that Kieran, who has a Mk2 Golf GTi along with several other cars stored in their barn, will keep the car.
“Seeing as he has got eight cars and refuses to get rid of any, I think he’ll hang on to it,” says David.
In the meantime, Judith and David have many more miles to travel, and many more memories to make, in the car that means everything.
