Every time Paul Myall gets behind the wheel of his 1971 Volkswagen Fastback, he’s transported back to his teenage years.
He bought the pastel white Type 3, in true ‘time warp’ condition, nearly five years ago, but the memories stretch right back to 1990 and the then 17-year-old’s first car.
“I bought an edition of Volksworld with one red and one yellow Fastback on the front, and I thought ‘I want one of those’,” he says. “I had friends who all had Beetles – but I loved the Type 3 shape, particularly the Fastback.”
He found a Fastback, officially a Type 31, that needed a fair amount of work but, once it was on the road, he’d join his mates on trips out, including to the early years of Bug Jam at Santa Pod.
Unfortunately, after about 18 months, the Fastback was badly damaged in an accident, and was eventually sold on despite Paul’s intermittent efforts to repair it.
Life and more practical cars took over, and Paul drifted away from the Volkswagen scene.
Back in the VW scene
Fast forward to January 2020 when, armed with some money left to him by his grandparents, he found a way back in.
“The one thing I’ve always wanted was to get back into the Volkswagen scene, and I suddenly had the money to do it, which I was very grateful for,” he says.
“I had a look on Car and Classic, not really expecting to find anything because, generally, what you find is a project that you’ve got to invest some money in.
“This car was advertised as a running, driving, MoTd, low mileage UK car. But with all my experience of these cars I thought ‘there’s going to be a horror story under it somewhere’.”
He travelled round the M25 from Ipswich to Little Missenden, near Amersham, to view the Volkswagen, fully prepared to be disappointed.
“I did the usual kind of things, crawled under it, over it, through it, in it,” he says, “but when I lifted back the rubber floor matting I found original sound deadening on the floor pans.
“The bulkhead under the bonnet was not rotted out, there was no rot under the rear gutters and drains, and I just couldn’t quite believe what I was looking at. I asked ‘are you sure it’s a UK car?’ And it was. It was remarkably solid.”
Rotten Fastbacks
It’s no surprise Paul was taken aback, given his earlier experiences with UK Fastbacks.
When he found his first one in a garage in Newport Pagnell, where he grew up, “it was the usual thing, the battery had fallen through the floor”.
“It needed hundreds of pounds worth of welding, but the mechanic I bought it from, a really renowned Volkswagen guy called Ray Bettles-Hill, got it all back to a roadworthy state for me,” he says.
“After the accident, I carted it around with me for a number of years, trying to get bits of it done at a time, but eventually selling it on. In the end, I just couldn’t afford to keep it in storage or move it around anymore.
“After that I bought another couple of Fastbacks and a Squareback, but never in a roadworthy state, and I never managed to get them on the road. It was the usual ‘project in the garage that I’ll get round to one day’, but eventually you need some money and it gets sold off.
“My mum, 30 years later, was phoning me every week saying ‘can you come and get these bits out of the garage you’ve left behind?’”
Original UK car
Paul’s new Fastback could not have been more different, an almost entirely original car with three previous owners and just 40,000 miles on the clock, all backed up by an MoT history.
The car came with a folder of documents dating right back to its first owner, a German called Ernst Kuhn living in the UK who used it to commute to and from the train station.
“I’ve even got a copy of his driving licence and 1970s fuel ration card, everything,” adds Paul, a 51 father-of-three. “After he’d owned it, the car was put in a garage and stayed there for 25 years, before being recommissioned and sold to SR Kinsell, who kept detailed records of everything spent on the car. It then ended up with the lady owner I bought it from, who had it for about five years.”
Paul didn’t fancy tackling the M25 for his first drive, so the car was trailered home to Ipswich.
From there, he drove it up the A14 to Burwell to see Paul Medhurst at Type 2 Detectives.
“I get in it – I’m 18 again”
“It’s one of those experiences where it’s got a particular smell, with the vinyl interior, and you remember the thin steering wheel,” he says. “I get in it and it transports me – I’m 18 again in 1990, watching mechanics at Bug Jam roof-chopping a splitscreen bus over the weekend, with some crazy stuff going down the strip and seeing the Prodigy live. Every time I get in that car it takes me back to that time.”
Having dropped the car off in Burwell, he had a phone call from Medhurst.
“Once he got it and got stuck into it he phoned me and said ‘I’m surprised you got here because there’s about an inch of gunk laying in the bottom of the fuel tank’,” says Paul.
“He had it for a fortnight and went through it thoroughly, front to back, to ensure that it was solid and safe. It had new discs on the front, a couple of new headlights, and a top end rebuild.
“It needed two pieces of welding, a bumper hanger and a tiny patch on the inner wing. His sign off to me was ‘you’ve got a pretty remarkable car as a survivor story’.”
Paul believes the Fastback’s Pastel White paint is almost entirely original.
“At one point it got damaged in a garage and it had a new windscreen, and I’ve had a detailer look over it who believes the roof might have been resprayed, but everything else is original paint,” he says.
The most basic Fastback
Paul’s car is a 1600TA base model, manufactured after the 1970 facelift that not everyone loves.
“It’s got no stereo, no chrome trim down the side, one wing mirror, one sun visor, and even the surrounds on the indicators are not chromed,” he adds. “It’s the most basic model you can get but it’s a smiles per hour car. It’s not a fast car, but it attracts attention, waves and looks everywhere it goes.
“I joined the ‘don’t hate the late’ Facebook group, referring to the later models. It’s a bit fugly, and people say it’s got a funny face, but I just fell in love with the look.”
While the car is mostly stock, Paul has added a couple of minor modifications.
“I put clear lenses on the front indicators rather than the orange ones, it’s very mildly lowered at the front, and it’s got the replica Porsche Gas Burner wheels,” he says.
“And that’s what people sometimes shout when it’s driving down the road – ‘is it a Porsche?’ because it’s reminiscent of early 911s.
“Because there are so few left, people often don’t know what it is, and if they do have a recollection, it gets called Variant quite a lot, which is obviously the Squareback version, not the Fastback.”
“Best restored car”
Soon after Paul got the vehicle on the road, Covid struck, but he did manage to get the car to a show at Glemham Hall, where it won, “oddly enough”, he says, “best restored car, even though it’s unrestored”.
“The judge had owned them in the past and he said ‘it’s in remarkable condition, I’m so taken with it’. It was pipped to best in show by a Saab 99, which was in equally cracking condition.”
Since then, he has joined the Suffolk Bugrs club, and has taken the Fastback to various local shows, including Beetle-Juiced at Jimmy’s Farm, the East Coast Retros meetings at Shotley, and Alive & V-Dubbin at Haughley Park, which is where we’re chatting.
“It’s not the most comfortable thing for long, long distances,” he says. “Run to the Sun in Cornwall is a great idea, but I’m not sure I want to go that far in it.”
After getting to know Naomi and Andrew, who run the Haughley Park show, Paul volunteered to join the crew and do a couple of shifts over the weekend.
“We brought the car and enjoyed the show, and the following year I got involved with the set-up crew, and I’ve done more and more every year since,” he adds.
Family affair
“Now it’s a family affair with my wife Karen, and eldest son Connor, both volunteering. It’s a great show run by great people, and we always have a really good weekend.”
He’s here with Connor, 24, with teenagers Oscar and Finley, who will get involved with the show next year, set to join him later in the day.
“Those two delight in getting in the back of this, because it’s got no rear seatbelts so they’re sliding up and down the vinyl seat,” says Paul, “plus the fact it’s quite springy and bouncy in the back, a completely different experience for them to anything they’ve been transported in before.”
As for the future, the Fastback will be with Paul for a long time to come.
“That’s a forever car,” he says. “That’s being handed down to children. It’s not one that I want to part with, or would ever think about parting with.
“It’s such a rare find that I don’t have any desire to chop it in for anything else. It would be nice to think that my original one might crop up somewhere, and I’d buy that back in a heartbeat, but I think that’s long gone to a scrapyard, and this is the next best thing.”
