Like Sore Thumbs

Germans have a sense of humour. Of course they do. See, they made the Volkswagen Golf, and then they made a pick-up version of it and called it a Caddy. Ho ho. Das ist verr funny. You see? Germans can make jokes too, just like other humans.

Now forget the Golf. This is a completely different car. No, really, it's not a Golf. The headlights are too square. But it's got a VW badge on the front and it's really blocky and angular. Which means it can't be a Beetle, so it must be a Golf. Simple, isn't it?

That's the trouble with the Jetta. When your maker is one of the worlds largest most famous car manufacturers, it can be a hard life not living up to the fame and glory of your siblings. And that name, Jetta? What's that got to do with sport? Is this some sort of joke?

Not really. The Mk I Jetta had a five-year lifespan as Volkswagen's comfortably small four-door, and it was a job it did admirably. The recipe, in typical German design, didn't include much in the way of flair or grace, just an honest earnestness towards its duties that it did without fail. Positioned awkwardly above the sporty little Golf and below the solid saloon of the Volkswagen-owned Audi 80, the Jetta was the mechanical bridge offering a more upmarket and sedate option to its vicious hatchback sister, without robbing any of the *cough* luxury credentials of the larger Audi. There were three trim levels depending on just how much cash you did have (without quite affording the Audi), but I won't bore you to details about which had the chrome strip and which one had the four horn buttons on the steering wheel. That would just be embarassing.

Think, if you like, of the Golf as a leather-jacket tight-jeans street-strutting punk. The Jetta is its science-fiction reading computer-club brother with National Health thick-frame glasses on. Underneath, they're identical; same squirty 8v engines, same suspension, same floorpan, but by adding that boot to the back the Jetta became that little bit more sober, more pragmatic, more unassuming. Which is why I like them.

Your basic line Jetta came with a range of engines, from the bog-standard 1.3 to the mighty injected 16v 1.8. The 1.6 litre engine in this one here would have soldiered on for miles and miles on a full tank. Frugal little beasts were these, and this little unit shows the scars of a long and meaningful life in the hands of someone who wanted all that firm solidity that VWs are famed for, without the brash little upstart attitude that comes with a Golf. After 25 years it's been laid up in a car park, this one now wears its hero badges of seven shades of silver spray paint (including some generous slapdash overspray on the driver's window) and plenty of crumbling flaking body filler, testament to a lifetime of being battered, patched up and sent back out to work some more. And if you take a look at the photos, there's only one wing mirror. Not that one's been ripped off; simply that only one was fitted. Why would it need one?

There's something eager about the Jetta. Something in those square lenses that pleads "Use me, use me! I'm German! I need a function in life!" - a statement that saw the subsequent models become the biggest selling cars in their class in America, and selling strongly too in Europe. It's a shame the original A1 Jetta came along as an afterthought; that boot end is like a tail waiting to be wagged; the obedient servant pleased to see its owner again. Hopefully this one will see a few more hundred miles yet.

If you skip back a fair few months, I mentioned that the grandaddy of Polish motoring was the FSO Warszawa, the mighty behemoth that got Poles behind the wheel again after World War II. It was a monster of a car, and unwieldy to your average potato-picker, which is why the Communist overlords of the 1950s decided that Poland needed a car for the common man. Something to show that Poland had equal prowess to Western countries. Looking back now, it seems a bit of a cruel joke. You can imagine the presidents of East Germany and Ukraine elbowing Poland in the ribs and smirking "Go on, Poland, YOU can do it, you show the Italians you can make something better than the Fiat 600", and then rolling around the floor with tears of mirth as Poland actually tries to do it. Enter then stage left, the pantomime horse; the FSM Syrena 105.

It should say something that, of the two prototypes commissioned in the early '50s, that it was the wood-and-canvas model that was chosen to enter production, as FSO simply didn't have the machines required to form sheet steel. The Syrena 101 (the first production model after the imaginatively-numbered Prototype 100) then rolled out of the FSO factory in Zeran factory in 1958 sporting a hunchback skin of hand-beaten steel (the wood-and-canvas model shook itself to pieces during a 5000km test run), spurted along by a two-stroke engine scavenged from an East German water pump.

Within seven years, another three versions (102, 103 and 104) had been knocked up, featuring such massive improvements as an exhaust silencer and a whole extra cylinder, temporarily robbing an old engine from Wartburg as part of the trade-over for the Warszawa 210 designs (the FSO prototype that became the Wartburg 353) before settling on a home-brew powerplant, the S-31. 842cc's of smoke-belching power were squeezed into the space under that hideous wart of a bonnet, allegedly capable of lurching the 1-tonne bulk up to 120km/h.

With such awe-inspiring power, the car, and its owner, were quickly dubbed "Krolowa Szos." Learning to say that is about the same level of difficulty as learning to drive the gloriously preserved vehicle here. It means "King of the Road," a phrase used to express the freedom it interred on the original owner, and I must be firm in making sure the tongue-in-cheek nature with which it is used is translated over to English.

You see, I've had one of these, or rather, the van-bodied version called the Syrena Bosto. A few years back, when I was more carefree and idiotic, I signed up for something called the Mongol Rally; a "race" of endurance from London to Ulan Bator, with one simple rule - the engine of your car has to be smaller than one litre. Think about it. You need to maintain a steady plod in a simple machine over 13,000 kilometres of road, dirt track and desert. Surely a solid-chassis'd car with leaf springs, 15" wheels and an engine containing seven moving parts would be IDEAL for this. Right?
Probably, yes. But not the Syrena. After roaring alont the length of Poland at a steady 65km/h (the top speed) for a day, the car bent its gear selector forks reversing out of a car park in the Czech Republic. That's not before losing the speedo, the exhaust and the dashboard electrics along the route; a mere 700km. I forced it to seven different mechanics that afternoon, who all laughed me out of their forecourts.

Despite all this, the original 105 was in high demand, and by 1972, the car was such an embarassment, sorry, was selling so well that production was moved to the enhanced facility of FSM, the Factory for Small-engined Cars, down in Bielsko-Biala. This new Syrena had the redeeming feature of normal hinged doors as opposed to the suicide variants sported by its predecessors. There were other magnificent items like the free-wheel handle under the steering column that acted like a hand clutch. You don't want to engine brake on a two-stroke motor because, with no fuel being fed in there's no oil either, so every time you go down a hill you yank the handle and hope the brakes don't fail. Which they do. Most Syrena owners have fond memories of installing wheel cylinders at the side of the road every 200km, or of the queues to collect the monthy petrol ration with every container the household owned to keep the engine burbling on that little bit longer. And lets not forget, this was in a planned economy, where cars were awarded to the individual on the basis of need or merit. Owning a Syrena was a status symbol. At this point, words simply fail me.

Somehow, possibly as a nasty government trick to divide the proletariat even more, there did actually appear something called the Syrena 105 Lux. Before you go expecting something luxurious like a cigarette lighter or a cup-holder or even a brake servo, the monumental feature of the Lux was a floor-mounted gearstick, which meant that the previous frantic struggle to find a gear from the gate-less selector on the steering column was now moved south. You still had to keep your arms up to hold the enormous steering wheel steady (a Syrena's steering is so vague you'll feel like a 1940's film star) or you'd career into a tree.

Astoundingly, two thirds of all Syrenas ever made were 105s, and between 1958 and 1982 half a million had been cobbled, bashed and bodged together when FSM eventually decided that, car for car, there was no point making the Syrena when the same amount of metal could make three Fiat 126's. At that point the last 105 rattled out of the factory and, 27 years later, one has ended up as a battered shell in a Warsaw carpark. Despite the smashed drivers window and the fact the car has been stood for a month, it's a testament to the sheer awfulness of this vehicle that nothing has been stolen from it. The seats are in, the wheels are on, even the engine is inside; the tramps who cart away old plumbing and refrigerators have turned their noses up at it. In that way, forgetting the Syrena is the kindest thing for Poland to do.

As a small extra, a few Syrenas took part in, and completed, some Monte Carlo Rallies. It is at this point that I'd like to point out that my 700km Mongol Rally section therefore counts as the longest and most successful international rally entry for the Syrena ever. Who's King of the Road now?

"Mare-koor, from Germany", drawls the deep 40-Marlboro's a day voice on the advert, as a familiar looking jelly-mould speeds through the desert, sweeping up clouds of amber sand and roaring head-on into a trio of foreign competitors. That's how America was introduced to the XR4Ti, an exoticly foreign sounding and slightly futuristic looking saloon from across the waters. There's even electronic drums and a power-metal guitar playing in the background, just to add a bit more drama. It's like a car advert mixed with a trailer for Top Gun; in fact, if the camera had zoomed in on the windscreen, you'd probably have seen Kenny Loggins inside. Wearing Aviators.

For anybody in Europe, all of this would have laughable. Who the hell would go to all that trouble for what was, essentially, a Ford Sierra? But remember, this isn't a Sierra. No, really, it isn't. Look at that bonnet logo. Click on the picture if you need a really closer look. Merkur. See? Mare-koor. Obviously different.

You can forgive people for trying too hard to promote the Ford Sierra. Any car that tried to fill the shoes of the Ford Cortina/Taunus was going to have to offer something special, and the overly rounded form of the new Ford didn't exactly meet expectations. Sure, it had all the technological advancements of a completely new car, but that dropped-ice-cream look didn't go down too well with the executives who wanted cars as angled and horizontal as their shoulder pads. Aerodynamics and low drag sounds good, but what the 80s was all about was hard, brash statements and shark-like aggression, not gliding through the air with a whisper. To be fair to the designers, the Sierra was simply too new; it didn't have anything in common with anything else in Ford of Europe's range, or even with its competitors. It would take time for people to get used to it.

It was four years after the initial launch of the Sierra that Ford of America decided people, hmm, well, possibly, maybe, had got used to it. The initial grumbles with the car had been ironed out, sales were on the up, and Ford had noticed just how many people were buying up European cars. A European Ford might be able to bite back a chunk of the market from the competition, and so plans were made to bring the Sierra to the USA.

Knowing American tastes, the Sierra would need to pull out all the stops if it was to wow an American audience, so the biggest engines were looked over to get the most power down from that rear-wheel-drive layout. It seems weird to think that a land famed for its overpowered gas-guzzlers with shocking fuel efficiency should be so stringent on foreign imports, but either way the big monster available to the Sierra, the 2.9 V6, was deemed too polluting, and an alternative had to be found. Meanwhile, the bodyshell was sent to German metalwork mentalists Karmen, for some performance enhancements.

In 1985 then, the Merkur XR4Ti arrived. All the trimmings of the European XR4i were loaded onto a structurally reinforced shell, implanted with a 2.3 litre 180hp turbo engine, then had a German-sounding name badge slapped on the bonnet (sorry, hood) to show off its engineering excellence. What this really meant is that Ford had so much faith in the XR4Ti that they weren't willing to risk their own brand’s names on it, instead creating a semi-fake brand to market the car. Merkur, you see, is simply German for Mercury, the quasi-luxury brand of Ford sold out of the same dealerships as Lincolns, which in itself was suffering from a massive identity crisis at the time.

They didn’t exactly fly out of dealerships. Every reviewer raved about its excellent handling (which was odd, since the Sierra was famed for being rubbish with corners) and lack of turbo lag, and enthusiastic clued-up buyers bought their share from their local dealer, but most people simply had no clue whatsoever what the XR4Ti was, or even who Merkur was supposed to be. Even the dealers had to be trained how to say the brand name, and many were simply unenthusiastic touting a car that robbed them of far more profitable sales of stablemates the Mercury Sable and Lincoln Town Car. For the image-conscious ‘80s consumer, plastic side skirts and that double rear spoiler were just a step too far in the tasteless direction to be forgiven. A disappointing 42,464 cars rolled away from the showrooms in four years; Ford had expected to sell 20,000 in 1985 alone.

Had the XR4Ti actually stayed in Europe, they’d have been immensely popular. A lot of the technological advancements went back to Ford of Europe for their touring car and RS programs, and American tuners found it easy to tighten up the body roll and pitching that were the only grumbles performance-wise. Had the intercooler from other Fords been added to the Merkur’s engine as standard, performance would have been upped to 210hp – more than the Sierra Cosworth, lusted after by boy racers all over Europe. And at least one, here in Poland, has pricked his ears up and taken note; it might look like another rotten executive saloon from the ‘80s, but that little Merkur badge makes a hell of a difference.

It doesn't matter how much work on your own car you do, or how mechan
-ically perfect you think it is; when it comes to the annual check-up, the testers will always find something that needs replacing. This year for mine, it was the front tie rod ends; the rubber elbow joints that connect the steering rod to the wheel assembly. A few years of Poland's winter salt was all it took to put more cracks than a Plumbers Convention into the rubber. Considering the nuts holding them on were also rusted solid and Polish mechanics are so cheap, I lurched my motor off to the nearby garage to have the tie rod ends swapped and the geometry aligned.

When you've got pneumatic tools (and a big selection of hammers), the job can be pretty quick, so I mooched around the forecourt sipping vending-machine coffee and listening to the Tourettes level of swearing coming from the mechanics whilst waiting for the work to be done. After a few minutes, one of the garage bay doors rattle up, and an orange lozenge comes burbling out.

My coffee went cold as I gawped and stared. It's not often that I see a car that I have absolutely no clue at all as to what it is, and I spent the next ten minutes sniffing as close around it as the mechanics would let me. In between the swearing, I managed to glean that this was a Saab Sonett III, from 1974, one of the last ever made. This particular one had been dropped off by a local driver in the classics rallies, and was his pride and joy. I'm not surprised.

Driving my own rust-bucket home, I couldn't get the Sonett out of my head. That teardrop snout, the Coke-bottle hips, the low slung bucket seats and pop up headlights; none of that was Saab. Saab make cars that look like crocodiles. They don't make pint-size roadsters. How the hell could this rasping little sports coupe have snuck out of Scandinavia without anyone noticing? Why was it slinking around back-street industrial-estate garages? If this was a Sonett III, what the hell happened to the other two?

The Sonett III, it seems, is really the final version of a 10 year evolutionary period. Yes, there were two prede
-cessors, but hardly what you or I would call a production run. The Saab Sonett Super Sport, or Sonett I, was an experiment in advanced design for Saab, and reared its dropped head at the 1956 Stockholm Motor Show. It never entered mass production, and only six are known to have existed worldwide.
For whatever reason, Saab sat on the idea for ten years before constructing the Sonnett II; a glass-fibre rebodied Saab 96 with the same two-stroke three-cylinder motor underneath the tilting bonnet. This was inevitably swapped for a more sensible Ford V4 (again, the same offered on Saabs other cars) but the Sonett II was still not a serious production. With its Opel GT-esque swoopes and gouges, the eclectic mish-mash didn't sit well with prospective clients, and less than 2000 units were assembled before its dramatic redesign as the Saab Sonett III, put into construction in 1970.

Looking at the specs on paper, Saab ticked all the right boxes. This fibreglass fancy weighed only 810kg - the same as a Trabant - yet had 65hp to hurl it up to 103mph. A lightweight pocket rocket with a sharp dynamic design (think Bricklin SV-1 or Fiat X1/9) from a company that started out making jet engines; where could this possibly go wrong? Why didn't the Sonett succeed?

Part of the problem can be attributed to Saab's image. They were then, and still are now, pleasantly practical saloons. "Responsible performance" is the byword of Saab, and you can't help but feel that no matter how much power or how many turbos Saab slap under their alligator bonnets, they'll never have the level of mental illness required to make a really good sports car. Unless drunk, Scandinavians simply aren't psychotic enough for that. The V4 of the Sonett III was no exception - it usurped the old oil-burning two-stroke for no other reason than Saab thought it was more pleasant for drivers not to have to mix fuel additives every fill up. This meant that nearly 50kg was added to the nose of the car for no particular reason, which many Saab purists feel upset the balance of the car from the more lightweight two-stroke.

Despite that, no serious criticism of the Sonett can be leveled; the fibreglass form is lovely to look at, the lumbar seats more than comfortable than the harsh buckets in contemporary sportsters, and you're not buying some odd-shaped plastic kit from a garden shed British supplier but a fully assembled product from a large European manufacturer. But for the early 1970s consumer, the massive hike in oil prices were simply dampening the buzz of owning completely impractical vehicles. When the whole sports car market was suffering a downturn, the Sonett III with its 1500cc (1700cc later on) should have been just what the industry doctor ordered, but for all that it just wasn't want people expected, or even wanted, from a Saab. You can drool about the 0.31 drag coefficient or the 12-second 0-60 time, but if you're a teenage boy with minimum bedroom-poster space available, telling your mates you've got a Saab on your wall just isn't going to impress anyone. So after only 10,000 units, the Sonett III was phased out, and it remains the Swedish manufacturer's only foray into the world of sports cars. More's the pity.

If you wanted something to represent the West's idea of what life under Communism was, it would be hard to find anything more epitomising than the Trabant. The depressingly practical yet structurally flimsy product of a planned economy more than aptly encapsulated contemporary opinions of what was going on in Eastern Europe, and the Trabant became the butt of all the jokes aimed at Ladas and Skodas too.

As with any planned economy, the People Need Transport question was answered in the flimsy little package of the Trabant. The round eyed little rattler was spawned from the Zwickau factory in East Germany, as early as 1955. It was dubbed the AWZ P70, under the ingeniously practical nomenclature that P meant Plastic and 70 represented the smoky 700cc engine underneath. Yes, plastic, or Duroplast as its manufacturer calls it, which bears an uncanny resemblance to fibreglass. The P-70 was little more than a plastic-bodied IFA F8 (the F9 would become the Wartburg, our Trabi's big sister); a pre-war design desperate for an update. Enter then, the first proper Trabant - the AWZ Trabant P50. A monocoque Duroplast shell with a feeble 500cc engine, the P50 is our embryonic Trabant. It introduced all the soft curves, frog eyes and lightweight chuckability into the 1950's attitude of car design, and the 18-hp three-geared drivetrain was almost twist-and-go-like in its simplicity.

Understanding just how crude the history of the Trabant is should then explain the enduring charm of the P-601. By 1964, when the P601 came out, other countries had small cars that were smarter, cleaner and more powerful. The Morris Mini the 2CV, the Fiat 500; all were using four-stroke engines at this point, and it was only the suffering lack-based economies ("you can't count on anything") of the Eastern Bloc that still depended on the blue-fug-producing two-strokes. The Trabant is a product of this lack; the Duroplast used for the body is a recycling of cotton and resin waste products from other heavy industries, and yet still there were waiting lists of up to 12 years for a new Trabant, because production output was so slow. This also meant that used-car prices were higher than those for new models; the immediate availability added a premium value to the poison-yellow death traps.

One of the few boasts any Trabant owner can make is that each machine was hand-assembled; videos of mulleted and moustachio'd Germans pounding on panels with rubber mallets to make them fit should show you just how much energy went into each Trabi to get them on the road in the first place. The other is the famous Elk test; if you haven't heard, new cars taken to Sweden where they are driven at speed towards a moose. At the last moment, they make a few hard turns to avoid the beast, and the car is measured in terms of controlability and safety. Mercedes' baby A-class attempted this in 1997 and fell over, injuring the two occupants. The Trabant passed with flying colours, which is what keeps it alive in rally circles today.

Little happened over the 27 years of Trabant production until 1988, when one of the maddest ideas ever was put forth. As Perestroika reared its ugly head and the choking toxic two-stroke fumes wreathed Berlin, the decision was made to ditch the engine in favour of a clean and cheap 1.1litre Volkswagen model left over from the Polo. Great in theory; a small, simple recycled car made of parts-bin mechanicals for the new economy. In practice, dumping 40hp into an 800kg car made for a twitchy barely-controllable drive. Combine that with the Duroplast concept where crumple-zones become disintegrate-if-its-a-bit-chilly zones, and you have a car which, if the accelerator is tapped a little too vigourously, will result in a toxic pile of burning resin smouldering against the Berlin Wall. Little wonder then that by the time production shut down in 1991, only 40,000 P601s had the Polo engine ; only a few thousand more than the original AWZ P70. By the reunification of Germany, Trabants were held in such low regard that they were swapped for packs of cigarettes, or left abandonned by the side of the road to rot. Only Trabants don't rot; that Duroplast is 100% non-biodegradable, which made getting rid of them even harder than buying them in the first place. A recent plan by Budapest City Council to swap Trabants for a year's free public transport yielded 200 Trabis to the local scrapyard; 120 of them were then recycled into spare parts for the remaining models rattling around.

It's hard to shake off a Trabi; the warm glow of nostalgia has burned away the fog of exhaust smoke, and short of smashing one into an elk, they'll be with us for some time to come.