1984, when the V8 was still king of the street ... and the target for Beetle owners

Blow their doors off, and we mean that literally!
The early third-generation GM F-body had easily  blown-off doors, but they were quicker than stock Beetles.
Small Car Specialties

I went to high school in California in the early 1980s, a place and time that marked the high point of the worship of heavily modified air-cooled Volkswagens. Baja Bugs were commonplace daily drivers, Centerline and EMPI wheels were bolted to even edge-case VWs like the 411, and everybody was hacking up their engine cases and adding big cylinders and stroker cranks. I had the world's sketchiest 1958 Beetle, complete with hopped-up 1776cc Type 3 engine and cheapo Brazilian dual-port heads, and so that meant that I was an obsessive reader of all the VW-freak magazines (at least one of which is still in business). The ads in those magazines were masterpieces of early-'80s California culture, and so I picked up a big stack of 1983-84 issues and found some great stuff.

They actually found a Camaro-appropriate driver for this ad. Note the Fu Manchu mustache and Lemmy Kilmister muttonchops.

Small Car Specialties

This ad was created by Small Car Specialties, one of dozens of VW-centric aftermarket-parts businesses operating out of Los Angeles and Orange Counties at the time. SCS was known for their great VW events, but closed their doors in the early 1990s when the following generation of California car freaks turned out to like Hondas better than VWs. There's a lot going on in this photograph, which shows a Beetle accomplishing the not-terribly-difficult task of beating an early third-generation Camaro in a drag race (the 1982 Z28 had a grim 165 hp inside its hottest engine, a "Cease-Fire" EFI-equipped 305). Note the horrified Camaro driver wondering how that Bug is separating the doors from his once-masculine machine.

Because air-cooled Beetles were so light, you could make them insanely fast with fewer than 100 horses.

Small Car Specialties

As I recall, you could get up to 1835cc displacement by just adding bigger cylinders and pistons (readily available for cheap from many sellers), and of course you'd want to ditch the eentsy Solex carburetor and add dual Webers or Dellortos. With nutso short gears, all the weight over the drive wheels, and total weight way under a ton, a Beetle with fat tires and 90 or so horsepower under the engine cover could beat most stock Detroit cars with V8s, at least in a short-ish drag race. Not mentioned in this ad, of course, was the fact that it was even cheaper to get power from a small-block Detroit V8, but the point remains: blow their doors off!


These days, of course, V8s are respected but not regarded as the kings of the engine-power world. But back in 1984, they were the targets for air-cooled VW (and Datsun 510) owners.

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