STATIC CHARGE
Words: Alex Grant
Photos: Adam Walker
Home-built and laced with PhD-level problems to solve, Jake Belfield’s slammed and carb’d Mk2 Polo shows anything is possible if you’re determined enough.
It’s become a bit of an obsession,” Jake Belfield says. “No one had got an old Polo this low before so we had to figure out the answers for ourselves.” And we’re talking answers to questions tougher than the working life of a Volkswagen Group diesel emissions engineer. A combination of tiny wheel wells, underbody protrusions and archaic 1970s suspension make this sort of sill-worrying almost impossible on a pre-1994 Polo, even with air-ride. With each millimetre it got closer to the floor, the Polo fought back even harder. Jake’s patience and do-it-yourself attitude is impressive…
“YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH THE BANG FOR YOUR BUCK“ YOU GET FROM ONE OF THESE…
“I’ve suffered a ball joint lockout, destroyed CV joints, smashed sumps and because the gearbox sits low on Polos I’ve also ruined one of those… on a cat’s eye,” he laughs. “Most of the issues have been solved now, but I spent a lot of time jacking the car up and testing different things out to get it this way. But it sits the way I want it and it’s setup to drive okay at that height, too.”
That hard work has paid off. Against the steel-and-concrete backdrop of our photoshoot location, that square-edged contrast of chrome-on-Tornado red pops even more than it did when it picked up our Sponsor’s Choice award at Edition 38 this year. From the ground (and car)-breakingly low ride height to the 145bhp bike carb’d engine in its smoothed bay, and even that classic interior, everything just works. Yet, for the two years this project took to build, suspension gremlins have been one of many jobs which have done anything but work.
That ongoing struggle was never the result of some carefully hatched masterplan either. Although the 25-year-old Staffordshire-based plumber has had a long line-up of Volkswagens – numerous other Polos and a modified G40 among them – he initially just wanted a runabout for the summer. “I picked this up from Telford on the way back from Ultimate Dubs in 2013. The paintwork was every shade of red you could imagine, it had dirty grey standard seats, a lowering kit, P-slots, and most of the rest of the interior had been ‘retrimmed’ in some horrible beige suede material. It was a cheap car, though, so I wasn’t bothered.”