Racing round the frozen Zell Am See track in 1959, pulling skiers behind the cars (known as ski-joring). Plenty of Beetles and Porsches. You can also see the eventual winner, the famous one-armed Austrian Otto Mathe and his home-built car. Click on the image below to see the video MOTOR RACERS USE ICE TRACK I [...]
Courtesy of Ultra VW Magazine (CHPublications) By John Plow Treasure Hunting Going through a shoe box of old photos the other day, I came across pictures of my old orange 1973 Beetle, a car I purchased a little over 15 years ago on one of my treasure hunting missions to the southern United States. Few [...]
Courtesy of Ultra VW Magazine (CHPublications) By John Plow Gone Fishin’ I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression. Published in 1939, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration during the 1930s highlighted the hardships endured by American farming families displaced from their homesteads, forced [...]
Courtesy of Ultra VW Magazine (CHPublications) By John Plow I’ve found a time machine, one that takes me back to my youth growing up in Toronto in the 1970s. Where the people are friendly and the roads are congested with old Volkswagens; Type Is, IIs and IIIs littered throughout the motorways, humbly going about their [...]
Courtesy of Ultra VW Magazine (CHPublications) Solo Crossings by John Plow I just finished reading a good book, Sea Change, written by Peter Nichols, concerning his 6 years living aboard a 70 year-old, 27-foot wooden sailboat, Toad. In particular, the book focuses on his solo trans-Atlantic crossing from England to the United States without an [...]
My good buddy (and ex-Cal-Look.com colleague), Dave Conklin (and his wife) recently came and stayed with my wife and me. He had a photo shoot to do for Excellence Magazine, featuring a 1970 Porsche 911 ST replica. Actually, to call this a replica is an insult; built with a myriad of unobtanium period performance parts, [...]
I’ve always loved seeing VWs in competition back in the day, and one of the most successful teams was the Porsche Salzburg Team, who enjoyed tremendous success in the early 1970s campaigning 1302s and 1303s running 125 HP 1600 cc Type I engines with 46 IDA Webers. Unfortunately, the gas crises eventually shut down the [...]
By John Plow Courtesy of Ultra VW Magazine Fire Management One of the things I enjoy most about the VW hobby is meeting the characters that seem to flock towards the idiosyncratic air-cooled Volkswagens. Like moths to a flame, it seems as though the quirky nature of our favored mode of transportation attracts a cross-section [...]
I’ve always loved the lines of this car. I finally got to see a replica body during the new Porsche Museum’s grand opening in early 2009, where I took this photo. And I couldn’t stop staring at it. It’s so VW, so Porsche, so perfect. Every line is right. Everything is in place and nothing [...]
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