pretty amazing... i think the owner could be more encouraging and supportive of Nicole, she did great... not an easy car to drive obviously.

 

Pretty cool. I thought it was at first a sleeper bug like for camping.

 

Correct. No matter what kind of air-cooled power you have in back, both the Beetle and Corvair, particularly with the earlier swing-axle suspensions, tended to be tail-heavy, unstable, prone to oversteer, and, in extreme cases, tire-tuck-under which could flip the vehicle. Of course, in his case, he did a lot of special work on the chassis, but, in some ways, you still had some unfavorable physics.

 

Being an old Volkswagon guy, I found this incredibly entertaining. Nicole seemed a bit in over her head, especially driving, but she's delightful nonetheless! As much as I would love to have a sleeper like this, I wouldn't be happy with the lack of drive-ability due to the crashbox tranny. I would gladly give up some HP for synchro's.

I built a sleeper VW 67 camper van with Gene Berger racing components, however, wasn't aiming for an insane race car like this. I only wanted to keep up with freeway traffic and not be considered "Hitler's revenge" like most VW buses!

 

^^^ very cool.

yeah not sure why he didn't put a stick with synchros in there. Maybe it would take up more room?

about the video, while he seemed eager to show her what it could do when he was driving, he seemed absolutely terrified when she was driving.

 

He told the host he could boost the HP higher with the dog box tranny, but the configuration of transaxle/tranny/engine must have been a factor as well, as many high HP vehicles have synchronous transmissions.

The owner looked like he scared himself too a few times when the bug hopped into the oncoming lane upon hard acceleration (again a drive-ability issue). Seeing how difficult it was for him to drive, one can imagine how he felt putting the wheel in the hands of someone inexperienced with this kind of power-to-weight ratio.

 

ultimately i think it's a pretty terrible car but quite the engineering feat.

i just watched her video on the guy obsessed with mini's - it was awesome.

 

I worked at the shop next door to Gene Berg's shop in Orange CA. for 2 years.

 

Cool! I lived off Ball Rd., near the 57 at the time (1984), so was just 5-10 minutes from his shop. This made the engine build easy, as opposed to people all over the world who use Gene Berg parts and machining, but have to ship parts back and forth.