Long Way Home


 


Everyone who brings a car to the VolksWorld Show makes an effort, but some, like Tero Virta from Finland, make a little bit of extra effort...


 


“I remember how me and Kai ‘Kaitsu’ Aulankoski walked past this car in the Bug Run campsite and laughed, saying ‘what a horrible porno red piece of crap’,” Tero Virta recalls, laughing. “A few beers later that evening we noticed it was for sale and things were looking different – ‘Hey, a cheap original Cabriolet with Sprint Stars, 356A brakes and a 1600cc engine with all the shiny ping-pong parts one can imagine!” One of Tero’s group was still sober enough to take him for a test drive, and between them they had enough money to buy it, there and then, so he did. “I had wanted an early Cabrio for a while but wasn’t planning to buy anything at that show other than just a few accessories, like Sprint Star wheels for my ’63 Beetle.


“I got the wheels, but didn’t plan to have a car attached to them!”


When he returned home to Finland a week or so later, Tero had the opportunity to give his new acquisition a proper once-over, without the aid of beer goggles this time. And things didn’t look quite so rosy. “I uploaded some photos of the car to my website and soon after received an email from someone in Sweden saying it had been a parts donor for his own ’64 Cabriolet project and that he had most of my Cabriolet-only parts. The email ended with ‘have fun, but don’t think about restoring it...’


He then had to make a decision – keep it or sell it – but resolved to drive it as it didn’t require any immediate work. And so began what Tero laughingly calls his “10-year love and hate relationship” with this car. Top priority was what would turn out to be the first of many changes of wheels and engine, from the ‘porno red’ Sprint Stars it had come on to MWS BRMs, and from the chrome crap 1600 to the stock 1200 out of his old ’63. Two summers later, he was still enjoying the car, which now wore a set of genuine EMPI 5-spokes and had been reunited with a genuine Cabrio back seat as well as sporting a 2161cc stroker motor. Still though, there was the nagging doubt about what was hiding under the ‘porno red’ bodywork.


“In retrospect, the car was cheap and had many of the flaws the buyers’ guides tell you to beware of but, if I look back, there hadn’t been that many better options for that money,” Tero says in a reflective mood.


Then came the winter of 2001/’02, when Tero bought a semi-restored, driveable ’64 Bug, which promptly donated its stock 1200 to the Cabrio, while the 2161 from the ’Vert took its place.


Having a fast ’64 street car diverted his attention from the Cabrio for a year or so until, in the winter of 2002/’03 he decided to finally take the plunge and see what a full body off ’pan restoration would reveal, selling the ’64 to release some funds to do the work. 


A few weeks spent poring over the Restowagen forum, particularly some of the build threads therein, confirmed the direction Tero would now take with the car.


Finding the right person to do the body restoration was never going to be easy, but when Tero found out that a fella named Kari Kuusharju had recently returned to Finland, he knew he was the man for the job. That was the good news. The bad news was his suspicions about the bodywork turned out to be well founded: “The ’Vert looked like it had been a late ’80’s / early 90’s Scandinavian Cal Looker or custom in the past, as the trim and bumpers had been removed, then put back on again and the dashboard had welding seams where it had been modified before. Also, a lot of the previous repair work needed to be redone.”


Enthused by the Restowagen guys, Tero persuaded Kari to finish the last bits of the bodywork he’d agreed to do, then moved the car to Juhani and Marko Laaksonen’s shop at the beginning of 2007 for final finishing and paint. While the body was away, Tero could focus on collecting the remaining bits for the project and reassembling the freshly painted floorpan. Onto this went a mildly narrowed front beam with dropped spindles, Porsche-pattern discs and Koni red shocks. At the rear, a set of EMPI disc brakes and more Koni reds.


By the start of 2008, the body was painted and work to reassemble the car could begin. 


The one area that had bugged Tero all along was the Cabriolet’s roof and there was no way he wasn’t going to do this part of the job properly now, so new wooden bows were ordered up from CSP in Germany, while a new dark brown exterior and cream headliner came from TMI. All was going well until his buddy Kaitsu, who had agreed to help him with this difficult stage of the project, opened the box with the headliner in and discovered it was velour, declaring in no uncertain terms that there was no way he was going to fit that to Tero’s car! Once again, Bob at BBT in Belgium came to the rescue with a mohair one and, by the summer of 2009, the car was ready for its MoT.


Now it was just a case of fitting the wheels... You’ve probably realised by now that Tero is a bit of a wheel pervert, but the problem this time was deciding which of his many wheels to use: “I love my original Gas Burners but they require too much maintenance to look complete with the shiny car, so in the end I chose the best two 4.5 Fuchs I had and the 5.5 Fuchs for the rear, and started polishing!”


And with that, Tero loaded the car onto a trailer and set out on the 2,000km (1242mile) journey to the VolksWorld Show at Sandown Park.




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