GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.
Just past the concession stand at Denver’s Bandimere Speedway, guys eat nachos while watching a girl in a polka-dot bikini get baptized, VW style.
She’s perched on a small seat in a Volkswagen bus, its back end turned into a dunk tank. “Fahrvrumdunken” is written on the bus’ side and the water inside shimmers in the Sunday afternoon sunshine.
Thunk. Splash. She’s down.
Nearby, people cram themselves in and on a reinforced VW Beetle, trying to beat the weight record set last year.
Crammed
Believe it or not, on Aug. 7, 2005, there were 69 people and 9,404 pounds on that 1970s model Bug at the Bug-In, a show and swap meet in the Mile High City.
Hannah Davis of Grand Junction was one of the kids inside the Beetle, which beat the event record by 4 pounds.
Her dad, Terry Davis, had hung off the Bug’s bumper.
“I was like this,” Hannah said, dropping to the pavement and hugging her knees, making her body into a little ball.
“So I had plenty of room,” she said, popping back up, as if that explained everything.
VW love can make people do funny things.
Not only do they jam themselves into tight spaces, but people also pray fervently for vehicles that look like insects to please, please, please not break down or run out of gas. And no incense could replace that signature smell of the interior of an old Beetle.
Like a religion
VW love is very near religious.
“It’s a small cult,” said Eric Madson of the VW fans in Grand Junction.
Madson was at the speedway with his 1964 Karmann Ghia drag car.
“I was a converted VW person,” said Deanna, Eric’s wife.
The transformation began when they were dating, and so did the Bug stories.
The two were side by side at a stoplight in Grand Junction.
“I was playing hot rod,” Eric said.
He was in his 1969 street racing Bug. She was in a Mercury Topaz.
Caught up in his car and the girl, Eric wasn’t paying attention to what was behind him.
The light turned green. He took off.
The cop behind him flipped on his lights and chased.
Madson whipped around a corner, jumped out, opened the Bug’s engine cover and threw the throttle wide open.
When the cop pulled up, Madson swore his quick start and speed were because the throttle was stuck.
The cop let him off.
VW love can be sweet, but like Walt Disney’s huggable Herbie, it has its “moments.”
Madson’s Ghia had one such “moment” at the Bug-In.
Lined up for the Pro Mod, he let the Ghia go, and it snapped.
The axle broke right off the line, and Madson almost got personal with the wall.
More Top Picks Checkers
On a better day, the Ghia’s fastest speed is 155 m.p.h. It has cleared the quarter-mile in 9.18 seconds. Madson was the Pro Mod champ for 2002-2003.
“Once you drive one, I don’t know . . . you get hooked,” said Keith Gosselin, who works for Painter’s Grinding, a Denver machine shop.
Behind the shop’s tents at the Bug-In, Gosselin had just had a 13.32-second run of the quarter-mile on the speedway in his 1973 VW Thing.
“This has a character,” he said of the Thing, with its bright blue body and flames on the hood.
His girlfriend won’t ride with him on his Harley, “but she’ll go in this, 100 m.p.h. in the dirt,” Gosselin said.
He doesn’t have a name for the Thing or for his ’63 Beetle, turbocharged and nitrous-injected, the fastest street-legal VW in Denver, he said.
However, Volkswagens have personalities “for sure.”
Gosselin didn’t fall for VWs as some do when they see the 1968 movie “The Love Bug.” He crashed into the faith.
“I was actually a spoiled little brat, to tell you the truth,” he said.
At age 19, he wrecked a Ford Bronco while trying to dodge a deer. Then he wrecked a Mustang.
Because his parents, Richard and Kathy Gosselin, wouldn’t help him out anymore with vehicles, he bought a Bug for $300. He couldn’t afford anyone to fix it up, so he did it himself.
He used to get his parts at The Foreign Aid on 25 Road. It led to his first job working on engines.
Economical car
VW Bugs “are pretty economical. . . . If an engine goes out, it costs about $1,200 to fix it,” Gosselin said. “You can rebuild a motor yourself for $600 if you know how to do it.”
“They run forever,” he said.
Several tents away, Derrick Pacheco, was looking at buying a transmission for $50 for his ’53 Beetle.
You can’t beat that, said Pacheco, who works for John Jones at Kustom Coach Werks in Grand Junction.
While Kustom Coach’s work is somewhat under the radar in River City, the shop’s restoration and custom work on vintage air-cooled Volkswagens is all over the Internet and can be seen in VW magazines in the United States and Europe.
The 1957 Beetle that put Kustom Coach Werks on the VW map, so to speak, was at the Bug-In with owner Brian Cleek of Colorado Springs.
Jones “calls it the 26-day wonder,” Pacheco said.
About two years ago, Jones pushed it into the shop, stripped it down, and in 26 days it rolled out in “KCW orange glow” with vanilla cream door panels.
A restoration in that short a time “is pretty much unheard of,” Pacheco said. “He painted every single nut and bolt.”
As he worked on it, Jones took photos of the Bug and posted them on VW Web sites. People from all over the world watched his progress.
The Bug debuted at a Las Vegas show.
Since Kustom Coach Werks has received a lot of attention lately, there has been good and bad said about them, Cleek said.
But the good outweighs the bad, and as far as he’s concerned, “those guys do a good job,” Cleek said. “You look on the Internet, and they’re everywhere.”
Jones and his crew are currently busy with a ’64 Beetle for a charity raffle.
Eric Stiner, director of the Central States Compact Drag Racing Association, out of Carmel, Ind., approached Jones about restoring a Bug that would be raffled off, 100 percent of the profits going to the Multiple Sclerosis Society.
“My cousin and a really good friend of mine have been diagnosed with MS,” Stiner said in a phone interview from Indiana.
His cousin was diagnosed when she was 9. She’s now 25.
His friend found out he had MS about two years ago, Stiner said.
Both are doing well at this time, he said.
Jones jumped all over the raffle idea, Stiner said.
He went to the theater to see “Herbie: Fully Loaded” and was psyched to make a new Herbie — Colorado style.
“Everybody is hyped up about [VW Bugs] right now,” Jones said.
And it’s not only because Lindsay Lohan looked cute behind Herbie’s steering wheel or because Herbie looked pretty hot tricked out for street racing and NASCAR.
“You can drive two weeks on a 10-gallon tank of gas. People are getting back into that,” Jones said.
Early Beetles didn’t even have gas gauges, he said.
A 1964 Bug was donated for the raffle by a Kustom Coach Werks customer in Telluride. Kustom is doing about $20,000 in free restoration labor, Pacheco said.
More Top Picks Best Calming Jars For Anxiety
It is a satisfying feeling to take a Bug from someone’s back yard and create an eye-popper on the highway, Pacheco said.
On the other end of the spectrum is Pacheco’s personal project, Hood Ride.
They are doing restorations at Kustom all day long, he said. When they are done, people sometimes are afraid to drive them.
Loved to death and back
A Hood Ride, on the other hand, has been loved to death and back.
It has character, and no one is afraid to drive it, Pacheco said.
The Beetle has a shape that can’t be mistaken, and strangers can talk like friends simply because they both own VWs.
Nineteen-year-old Katie Gosselin Schafer found herself chatting with a 90-year-old Bug owner from Fresno, Calif., for that reason.
“You know he’s the original owner,” Schafer said. “I can go and talk to him, and it wouldn’t be weird. We have a connection.”