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Meet The Ventura, An Air-Cooled VW-Based Sports Car You've Never Heard Of [View all]
https://www.theautopian.com/meet-the-ventura-an-air-cooled-vw-based-sports-car-youve-never-heard-of/Meet The Ventura, An Air-Cooled VW-Based Sports Car You’ve Never Heard Of
By Jason Torchinsky
October 4, 2022
I sometimes think that kit cars and specialty cars based on old air-cooled Volkswagen mechanicals aren’t exactly governed by the normal rules of reality. There should be a finite number of them, and at some point, I should be able to have encountered them all. And yet, that never seems to happen; there’s always another, some strange new gem I’ve never encountered before, dropping out of the aether in front of my face. This time, I encountered that new gem via a Facebook Marketplace ad sent to me by an Autopian named Dave. The ad shows a sleek, ’80s-wedge-looking sports car that it calls a 1968 Volkswagen Ventura, but it’s not really a Volkswagen product. Let’s look at what exactly this thing is.
One of the first things students of VW kit cars will notice about the Ventura here is that it’s not like most VW-based kit cars, which almost always used the Type I engine: The one found in the Beetle with a tall, tombstone-shaped shroud for the cooling fan. This one uses the Type 3 engine, also known as the “pancake” or “suitcase” engine because it was specifically designed to be as compact as possible, as it lived under the floor of the rear luggage areas on VW Type 3 Fast-, Square-, and Notchbacks.
Type 3s were never nearly as plentiful or cheap as old Beetles, so these never really caught on as donor platform for home-built kit cars. And that brings up another interesting point: this looks far too refined to be a home-built kit car.
That’s because it is too refined. Sure, it’s built on a VW chassis, but it wasn’t put together in a backyard. This is a factory-built car that happens to use VW mechanicals. And, if you know much about factory-built VW-based cars not built by Volkswagen, I bet you won’t be surprised to learn that factory was in Brazil.
[...]
By Jason Torchinsky
October 4, 2022
I sometimes think that kit cars and specialty cars based on old air-cooled Volkswagen mechanicals aren’t exactly governed by the normal rules of reality. There should be a finite number of them, and at some point, I should be able to have encountered them all. And yet, that never seems to happen; there’s always another, some strange new gem I’ve never encountered before, dropping out of the aether in front of my face. This time, I encountered that new gem via a Facebook Marketplace ad sent to me by an Autopian named Dave. The ad shows a sleek, ’80s-wedge-looking sports car that it calls a 1968 Volkswagen Ventura, but it’s not really a Volkswagen product. Let’s look at what exactly this thing is.
One of the first things students of VW kit cars will notice about the Ventura here is that it’s not like most VW-based kit cars, which almost always used the Type I engine: The one found in the Beetle with a tall, tombstone-shaped shroud for the cooling fan. This one uses the Type 3 engine, also known as the “pancake” or “suitcase” engine because it was specifically designed to be as compact as possible, as it lived under the floor of the rear luggage areas on VW Type 3 Fast-, Square-, and Notchbacks.
Type 3s were never nearly as plentiful or cheap as old Beetles, so these never really caught on as donor platform for home-built kit cars. And that brings up another interesting point: this looks far too refined to be a home-built kit car.
That’s because it is too refined. Sure, it’s built on a VW chassis, but it wasn’t put together in a backyard. This is a factory-built car that happens to use VW mechanicals. And, if you know much about factory-built VW-based cars not built by Volkswagen, I bet you won’t be surprised to learn that factory was in Brazil.
[...]
1 replies
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