CampFest 2014: The Good, The Bad, and The Muddy...

With most blogs and websites having done their features on the VW Campfest 2014, we thought we’d provide a different approach, instead of the general overview that many will give.

This was our first year attending the much anticipated and talked-about Vdub Campfest, the show that every car enthusiast in SA knows about, even if they’re not into VW per se. With weather forecasts predicting rain during the weekend of the show, we still decided to take the +-1000KM drive up to Vereeniging for the biggest car show on the African continent. Being one of the first to arrive, we were lucky enough to get a good spot on the corner just as you enter the camping grounds. This provided us with a perfect view to see all the cars coming to the show, and come they did! The constant stream of modified VW’s started with the convoy of FR&R Tuning coming into the resort, I remember; we were still busy lowering my car when we heard turbos spool and looked up to see the most uniform and bad-ass array of golf 5s and 6s, siroccos and polo GTIs, the best of which was a static Mk6 tucking 20inch BBS CH’s. Right then, we knew that this would be a great weekend.

After setting up camp we decided to walk around and mingle with some of our fellow VW enthusiasts, and I don’t know if it was just us but everyone was so friendly, asking if we wanted to join their party for the evening, praising our work (those who have seen it) and offering their help when they saw us lowering the car, even Vic Pardal stopped at our camp and told us “go lower boys, take it to the ground”. It made us feel at home and not like we were in a different city never mind province. 

The atmosphere got even better the following morning when most of the crews and day visitors showed up, I’m talking about an endless buzz of cars driving up and down, music playing all around and the smell of braai meat filling the air. Needless to say, the festival was now in full swing. The various stalls selling and promoting their products added a sense of legitimacy to the event, giving the campers a full spectrum of automotive this and thats, not forgetting the food and beverage stalls conveniently located so you don’t go hungry or thirsty. The Pitbull stand really attracted our attention with their Audi R8 on Vossen CV3’s and not to mention beautiful models perusing around and posing with cars.

Saturday night meant after party and this was as on par as the rest of the festival, with the DJ’s killing it on a deck built into a the front section of an Mk1 body, the ground became so soft and muddy because of the rain but this did not stop the dubbers from stomping their feet, and having Harrison Crump perform was the icing on the cake. Although the after party ended at about 12am, it did not stop everyone from continuing the festivity at the camp site until about 3am, some going straight through until sunrise.

As the sun rose on Sunday morning while copious amounts of energy drinks were being consumed, so the car washing began, everyone getting ready for the show and shine, making their way slowly but surely to the show grounds. All makes and models of Volkswagen came out from the bushes into the light, and when I say all makes, I mean all makes; like Mk2 Polos and Type 3 variants. The sense of “Vdub Family” was felt.

The show and shine was underway with cars struggling to enter the grounds as a result of the thick mud caused by the on and off showers since the Saturday morning. The rain then continued to be a hindrance during the course of the day, having participants continuously drying off their cars for judges’ inspection. The judges then, armed with their umbrellas and tablets/smartphones, went on to inspect the cars and rated them using the E-judging app, and after some time and tense debating, the winners were announced.

That pretty much sums up most of the good of the Campfest, we now unfortunately have to look at the bad, and we apologize if this sounds like a gripe list but we feel it needs to be said in order to move forward harmoniously. First of all, and this was a general consensus based on the amount of people posting it on Facebook; the toilet facilities were horrid after the first night and were never cleaned. This wasn’t really a problem for the guys but for the ladies it’s a huge “no-no”.

Secondly, when you decide to host an event that attracts lowered cars, a venue with decent roads should come to mind. We say this because there were speed bumps all over the resort (those thin high ones that catch you in the middle). This is not an issue for bagged or high cars, but for many of us rolling staticly low, it’s a nightmare, even though it was fun to see the creative ways cars go over these bumps.

This brings us to the final issue; as it goes with show and shine competitions, there are always problems with regard to the judging and sadly even a show of this magnitude is not immune. Issues which range from judges not being independent enough, to cars winning simply because of amount of money spent, or even lack of competitors in its class. But it goes without saying, that no matter the obstacles, it shouldn’t deter anyone, and in fact should only cause one to go harder the following year.

Overall it was an excellent weekend with lots of friendly people and remarkable cars, irrespective of certain issues, and we hope to attend next year when it’s even bigger and better.

Steady Creepn

This week officially marks a year of Low Company being in existence and as an automotive enthusiast it’s been a year I’ll never forget, we’ve done everything from travelling to other cities for shows, to hosting our very own automotive limbo event and of course, sitting up editing 'til the early hours of the morning. It’s also been a year in which we’ve learnt a lot, both as car enthusiasts and amateur photographers, and along the way we’ve met lots of amazing people, people who’ve become friends, people who love these man made chunks of metal, rubber and plastics, as much as we do.

2013 was also the year in which the car scene really came alive in South Africa, in particular the stance scene. The number of builds that can hold their own on an international level has more than doubled as well as the amount of shows and meets, figures that are sure to increase as we head into 2014, with that said it’s an exciting time to be someone who is passionate about all things automotive.

One of the cars that really stood out in the past year has been that of Johnathan Barnes, a simple 9n3 Polo which he’s managed to transform into something far beyond its rather plain factory guise. This car has been somewhat of an elusive one for us, before we met Johnathan it was simply known as “that Polo from East London”, the 1^st time I saw it parked at a local petrol station I immediately got on my phone and sent a message in our group telling the crew of the ridiculously low 9n3 I’d just seen. But as quickly as it popped up it disappeared again, only to make an appearance a few months later at a local meet and go back into hiding.

By this time the only information we had gathered on the Polo was that it was from East London and that it was part of the Street Candy crew, so when we took a trip to East London in September of 2013, we knew we had to be on the lookout for this car. To our surprise the car was at the Strictly Street event and sitting even lower than before, needless to say we made the necessary introductions and planned to do a shoot right then and there, but as we all know, plans have a nasty habit of not working out from time to time, and we left East London with only a number and a promise for a feature shoot in December. In hindsight this was one of the best things that could have happened, not only have we gained a friend through the following months of messaging back and forth but also, I can’t think of a better car to mark our 1 year anniversary.

Johnathan’s journey with his polo started about 2 years ago when he popped over to their local grocer for some bread and came home to a surprise of a bone stock silver VW hatchback parked in his garage, the car turned out to be a gift for his 21^st birthday. Being passionate about cars and preferring to stand out rather than blend in, he made his first modification in the form of a large tilt-and-slide sunroof from Webasto, a simple addition which turned out to be the starting point for more radical changes.

Johnathan proceeded to do a grille black out, and added a set JOM coilovers. Wanting to stand out a bit more he painted his standard daily wheels in a ‘hot’ pink and left it at that for a while. Street Candy’s first meet came around a few months later and in order to keep things fresh, a set of HRE 501 replicas, 17x7.5j (+28 offset) in front and 17x8j (+30 offset) in the rear wrapped in Nankang 185/35/17, were purchased.

Being part of Street Candy requires a certain amount a crazy, so when Johnathan entered the Show and Shine event in September this meant that he had to step his game up a level and he did this by firstly painting his wheels in a custom metallic blue and proceeding to add the blue touches around the car and engine bay, the next step was to go lower, and this was achieved by c-notching the chassis, removing the helpers and compressing the coilover springs a further 40mm, and adding camber plates in the rear to allow the rear wheels to clear the fenders.

The result of all this is one that constantly has you saying, “damn” but in a good way, because no matter how many times you see it you still can’t get over how well the modifications work together. Naturally it took the best of show at the event and months later it still has the same impact it did when we first saw it, what makes this even more impressive is that the car was raised for the shoot so that we could get around town easier, so Johnathan always has the option of shocking everyone when the need arises.

I think cars like these are only the beginning of what’s to come this year and we as Lowco will be doing our bit to showcase them to the best of our abilities. Here’s to Johnathan’s Polo and to a scraping 2014!

Mercury Rising

As I sit in front of my computer, putting a playlist together to listen to while I write this article, I realize just how long it’s taken for us to share this feature with the rest of you. It’s not because we haven’t had time to edit the pictures or the video, those have been done since September. I’ve just had a mental block of sorts when it came to putting together something worth reading to go along with the media that accompanies it, which is strange seeing as I just got out of my bed at 01:45am on a Monday morning with a burning desire to put ‘pen to paper’.

Browsing through these pictures, thinking back to the windy afternoon in September when we did this shoot, only one thing comes to mind… speed.

Wikipedia defines it as the rate at which an object covers distance, coincidentally above this definition they have a picture of a car on a drag strip to illustrate this and that got me thinking. Why are we as humans so obsessed with speed? Whether it’s the speed of our bandwidth or the amount of time it takes for the red light to turn green doesn’t matter, we instinctively just hate waiting.

While we all share that primal instinct, most car enthusiasts share another, we want to go as fast as we possibly can and once we’ve reached that point, we want to go even faster. Sounds the same as what everybody else wants doesn’t it? But I believe the reason for going faster differs. For the true speed demon it’s not necessarily about getting from point a to b as quickly as possible, it’s about that rush of adrenaline we get when we depress the accelerator pedal firmly against the metal floor panel, see the rev counter come alive all the way to that forbidden redline, and hear the dizzying combustion fury of the engine coupled with a hardening exhaust note. It’s about pushing a machine to its limits, coming to a halt, turning around, and trying to push it beyond that limit.

It’s a rush that the Mk5 GTi you see before you provides in spades, so naturally when we were presented with the opportunity to get up close and personal with this beast we wasted no time getting it in front of our lenses…

…An opportunity that was provided by Amish Raga, owner at Euro-Worx, and probably the most well-known VW enthusiast in the Nelson Mandela Bay area. Amish is a hard-core VW guy, and I don’t mean that in the sense that he has Volkswagen badges tattooed all over his body, but rather he’s hard-core because he’s only owned and built VAG cars for as long as I can remember and not only that, his family, friends and girlfriend all drive modified cars from the same German automotive giant. Coincidence? I think not.

However this is not the reason he is well known in the car community, Amish has built a reputation for turning out some of the best builds to ever come from Port Elizabeth, builds that are often ahead of the trends at the time. To give you an idea of the kind of builds I’m speaking about, in 2007/2008 he built an Mk2 GTi (pictured below) which ran stretched tyres, split wheels and coilovers, a time when those things were unheard of by the average enthusiast in PE.

This build is perhaps not as ‘ground-breaking’ for the scene today as the Mk2 was, but it’s of the same standard we’ve come to expect from the Euro-Worx stable and it’s packing something just as special, the infamous Ko4 turbo. The Ko4 conversion is popular for its ability to turn a seemingly ‘average’ GTi into a giant killer, with the right supporting mods, mods which this GTi possesses.

But the road to a successful conversion wasn’t an easy one for this particular Mk5, it started its modified life with a simple REVO stage1 software upgrade, after which the previous owner decided to go for the larger turbo. Round about this time the car started to develop a seemingly bottomless pit of problems; it managed to make power once and never again. Having visited 3 other tuning companies the owner gave up and traded the car in, this ended up being the turning point for a car that was crying to have its potential fulfilled. Enter Euro-Worx and a plan to turn a build that had gone completely wrong into what it was always meant to be, a giant killer.

The motor had to be built right this time around, from the ground up, and to ensure this Amish added a set of Arias pistons to the sub-assembly to handle the extra boost which was being provided by the Ko4 turbo from an OEM Audi s3. To make sure there wouldn’t be any problems with the cooling system and fueling, an s3 intercooler and injectors, along with an Autotech high pressure fuel pump were installed. To provide sufficient spark and keep the oil in check, the coil packs and oil cap from an Audi R8 found a new home in the Mk5 engine bay as well.

Cold air now enters the turbo through a REVO intake and the resulting hot gasses are expelled through a 76mm downpipe and full 63mm exhaust system. Having bolted everything up with stainless steel nuts and bolts, a REVO stage3 software upgrade was reigned in to make sure it all worked in harmony. And work in harmony it did, the once problematic GTi managed a respectable 254.8kW on its first dyno night after the rebuild and even managed to take the honors for the highest reading of the night.

To go with its impressive new found power the car needed some exterior enhancements to further separate it from other Mk5s. Subtle enhancements in the form of a colour-coded Vortex lip and rear apron quad pipe conversion, R32 taillights and polished 19 inch HRE replica wheels, with black inserts, wrapped in 225/35/19 Yokohama S Drives, all flow seamlessly together to give the car a more aggressive look. The car also had to possess the ability to stop well ahead of any obstacles and corner whenever the need arose and for this Powerbrake disks with a set of Endless pads are employed, while Vmaxx coilovers take care of the cornering and lowering aspects of the build.

What Amish has managed to do is build a well modified car with both function and form in mind, a true street sleeper that gives very little away with its exterior mods. We’ve dubbed this one Mercury Rising, because it goes to show that no matter how many obstacles one encounters or what state a project is in when you start out, if you stick to a plan and never throw in the towel you can still achieve the goals you set for it and rise to the top of your game.