Investigating The Golf GTI – ‘The People’s Porsche’

Daniel Mohacek












































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CONTENTS

Page:

List
of
figures
and
illustrations:
3

Abstract:









4

Introduction:
Can lessons be learnt from the Golf GTI?

5

Chapter One:
Giorgio Giugiaro and the ‘Sport Golf’


6


Chapter Two:
Volkswagen’s uncertain beginnings


11




Volkswagen’s development in the United States
15

Chapter
Three: The
new
Golf
‘GTI’
18

Chapter
Four:
Cult
Credentials
24

Chapter
Five:
Steps
to
success
32

Volkswagen’s
constitution
33

The
Eighties
environment
33

The
high
volume
Golf 34

Bibliography:
36

Internet
Sources:
38









































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FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure
Description:







1.1

The Volkswagen-Porsche ‘Tapiro’ concept car.

1.2

The Giugiaro designed Alfa Romeo ‘Alfasud’.


1.3

The 1972 ‘Folded Paper’ Lotus Esprit.



1.4

A secret prototype Golf model from 1969.


1.5

The Giugiaro designed 1980 Fiat ‘Panda’


1.6

The Giugiaro designed 1979 Lancia ‘Delta’



1.7

The Giugiaro designed 1983 Fiat ‘Uno’



1.8

The 1973 Volkswagen ‘Passat’ – B1



1.9

The 1974 Volkswagen ‘Scirocco’ – MK1


1.10
The 1974 Volkswagen ‘Golf’ – MK1
1.11
The 1976 limited edition Golf ‘GTI’




3.1
The 1982 MK2 Golf GTI

3.2
Golf
GTI
16-Valve

4.2

A 1990 ‘Big Bumper’ Golf GTI




4.3
The ‘Motorsport’ Golf Rallye

4.4
The
Golf
GTI
G60

4.5

The Golf VR6 The 1999 Polo GTI

































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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY


ABSTRACT

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

BA Hons.

Investigating The Golf GTI – ‘The People’s Porsche’

Daniel Mohacek


The submission combines myths, anecdotes and history in an attempt to dissect
the success story of the Volkswagen Golf GTI. The cult surrounding the cars is
described, factors contributory to its expansion are proposed, and the possibility
of its recreation examined.

The first chapter describes Giorgio Giugiaro’s work with Volkswagen, and details
the design proposal that would become the first Volkswagen Golf. The ‘Sport
Golf’ team are introduced, and their extra-curricular work which would define not
only the first Golf GTI, but all its subsequent rivals, is detailed.

The second chapter looks back at Volkswagen’s unsteady beginnings. It
particularises those factors inherent to the company’s constitution that enabled
them to succeed, and highlights how Volkswagen nurtured their unusually loyal
customer-base.

The third chapter looks at the success of the first Golf GTIs, and illustrates the
prestige they bestowed upon the rest of the range. The careful introduction of an
evolved ‘Mark Two’ Golf GTI is exposed, and changes to the model are
explained.

Chapter four looks to the ‘Eighties’ to explain the cult. It highlights the changes
made to the GTI range to pander the generation, and evaluates the power of
image within advertising.

The final chapter ranks and orders the facts discussed. Factors intrinsic to the
car’s success are evaluated and lessons are extracted in an attempt to define a
re-workable formula of merit to a designer or product planner of the late nineties.

© DMM 1999








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INTRODUCTION



Can lessons can be learnt from the Volkswagen Golf GTI?


Written from an undergraduate viewpoint, this study will look at the sequence of
factors whose combination defined the market into which the Golf GTI as both
product and car was launched. It will ask if Volkswagen could have predicted the
extensive success of the ‘Golf GTI’, and examine whether were they entirely
responsible for it.

The study will examine Volkswagen’s origins, analyse the difficulties they
endured, and study the subsequent effect of these hardships on corporation
policy. Volkswagen enjoy a reputation for quality. The study will investigate how
this reputation began, what steps Volkswagen took to sustain it, and how this
reputation influenced sales of the subsequent Golf GTI.

In an attempt to differentiate Volkswagen from other manufacturers, the influence
of long-term model evolution in comparison to short-term obsolescence will be
investigated. Volkswagen’s policies of quality control and reinvestment will be
appraised, as will the steps taken to ease the launch of the Golf .

The study will examine how consumer values changed at the start of the eighties,
how the GTI reflected and responded to these changes, and the steps
Volkswagen took to engineer a car that would later come to define a generation.

The study will conclude with a summary of the factors intrinsic to the car’s
success, this summary will be reviewed and lessons will be extracted in an
attempt to define a re-workable formula.




















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CHAPTER ONE



Giorgio Giugiaro and the ‘Sport Golf’

In the era of corporate design… the Mark 1 Volkswagen Golf was the last
mass-produced car to roll off the drawing board of a single designer.
(Futrell 1996 p56)

The Mark One (MK1) Golf was designed by one of the few car designers whose
name really stands out in the latter part of this century, Ital Design’s ‘Giorgio
Giugiaro’. Born in the Piedmont region of Italy in 1938, Giugiaro’s parents had
fully expected him to continue in the family tradition of painting frescos in
churches like his father and grandfather before him. At the age of seventeen,
having graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Torino, Giorgio was
persuaded by Dante Giacosa to work for the Fiat styling centre ‘Centro Stile’. He
soon became frustrated with Fiat’s endemic bureaucracy however and by the age
of twenty-one, had moved to the Italian coachbuilder ‘Bertone’. Whilst there,
under the guidance of the late Nuccio Bertone, he designed the Iso Grifo and the
Alfa Romeo Giulia GT. In 1966, Giugiaro moved to Ghia’s styling house where he
helped design the De Tomaso Mangusta and the Maserati Ghibli. In 1967 he left
and started his own company ‘Ital Styling’, which in 1968 was to become
‘ItalDesign’.

Right from their inception, ItalDesign were closely involved with Volkswagen.
During the early seventies Volkswagen were floundering. The future of the
‘Beetle’, by then a thirty-year-old design, was uncertain. In order to revitalise
flagging sales Volkswagen enlisted Giugiaro to create a new range of water-
cooled, front-engined cars. By introducing these cars alongside the air-cooled
Beetle, Volkswagen hoped to modernise their image, working alongside the
ItalDesign team as early as 1969. The first Giugiaro designed Volkswagen to
appear to the public was the 1970 Tapiro concept car.
Produced in conjunction with Porsche, who had in their infancy shared both
components and design with Volkswagen, the Tapiro (Fig 1.1) was adventurously
styled and in hindsight a clear pointer of things to come. 1971 saw the
introduction of the rounded Alfa Romeo ‘Alfasud’ (Fig 1.2) but it was not until the
launch of the 1972 Lotus Esprit (Fig 1.3) that Giugiaro’s ‘folded-paper styling’ was
first revealed. The significance of what ItalDesign had created with this stylistic
about-turn was not immediately obvious but as the decade continued, the
magnitude of what they had done would soon become clear.

When tracking a trend in automotive design over the past three decades, Giorgio
Giugiaro always appears at the forefront. His ability to provide production
schedules and devise ways of keeping costs down, have contributed significantly
to his reputation as one of the world’s top car designers (the Fiat panda uses the
same shape of glass in its front and rear windscreens for example: Fig 1.4). The
list of cars he has designed over his career is to say the least, impressive,

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including cars as diverse as the Lancia Delta (Fig 1.5), De Lorean, Saab 9000,
Fiat Uno (Fig 1.6), Renault 19, the Seat Ibiza and the 1993 Fiat Punto.

Giugiaro began modelling the ‘Golf’ however as early as 1969. ‘Secret prototype
models (Fig 1.7) released later show that Giugiaro had the ‘folded paper’ concept
in mind for Volkswagen earlier than most people believe’ (Yan 1998 p1). By 1972
the designs for the cars were complete. The first Giugiaro designed Volkswagen
to be released was the 1973 Passat (Fig 1.8). This was a large family car
available as either a saloon or estate and built on Volkswagen’s ‘B1’ chassis.

1974 however, saw an upturn in Volkswagen’s fortunes with the launch of their
most important two cars for twenty years. Based on the same front wheel drive,
water-cooled, transverse engined ‘A2’ chassis came the MK 1 Golf and Scirocco.
The Scirocco (Fig 1.9) was a sleek low-slung two door coupe bearing
unsurprisingly more than a passing resemblance to the Lotus Esprit, whilst the
Golf (Fig 1.10), which derived it’s name from the German word ‘Golfstrom’ or
(“gulfstream”), was an upright 2 or 4 door hatchback.

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Fig 1.1
The Volkswagen-Porsche ‘Tapiro’ concept car
Fig 1.2
The Giugiaro designed Alfa Romeo ‘Alfasud’
Fig 1.3
The 1972 ‘ Folded Paper’ Lotus Esprit
Fig 1.4
A secret prototype Golf model from 1969
Fig 1.5
The Giugiaro designed 1980 Fiat ‘Panda’
Fig 1.6
The Giugiaro designed 1979 Lancia ‘Delta’
Fig 1.7
The Giugiaro designed 1983 Fiat ‘Uno’
Fig 1.8
The 1973 Volkswagen ‘Passat’ – B1
Fig 1.9
The 1974 Volkswagen ‘Scirocco’ – MK1
Fig 1.10
The 1974 Volkswagen ‘Golf’ – MK1


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Launched at the Geneva Motorshow the Scirocco was offered with three trim
levels and three engines, and was met with praise for its crisp styling and fine
handling. All Scirocco production was carried out at the Karmann factory as the
car had been designed to replace the ageing Beetle-based Karmann Ghia, whilst
all Golf production was carried out at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant.

The first Golfs, as mentioned, were available in two or four door form, and were
offered initially with two engines, a 50BHP 1100cc or a 75 BHP 1600cc.

There are many versions of the series of events that occurred for the first Golf
‘GTIs’ to emerge. The basic story is the same however. In early 1975, the
engineering department at Volkswagen, consisting of only a handful of
enthusiastic engineers began what was to become known as the ‘Sport Golf’
project, to be based on the three door bodyshell of the one year old MK1 Golf.
The changes that Herbert Schuster and his team made to the car over the next
few months have become legendary and form the basis of the ‘Hot Hatch’ formula
that so many manufacturers have since followed so closely.

Audi’s merger with fellow German car manufacturer NSU in the late sixties and
the subsequent introduction of the combined businesses into the Volkswagen
group, gave the Volkswagen engineers their first access to a reliable water-
cooled engine with performance potential, the square stroke 1588cc Audi GT
engine. They started by fitting the engine with a traditional Carburettor system,
but judiciously switched to a modern Bosch K-Jetronic Fuel Injection system
during development. The system specified worked by measuring the engine’s air
demand characteristics at any given moment, and spraying corresponding
amounts of petrol directly into the inlet manifold as needed.

Offering ease of starting and instantaneous throttle response, coupled with
significantly improved fuel economy, fuel injection at the heart of the GTI was an
unquestionable element of its success…

The biggest structural alteration to the engine was the adoption of bowl-in-piston
combustion chambers of a ‘Heron’ design (dish-headed piston crowns), which
allowed the engineers to raise the compression ratio from 8.2:1 to 9.5:1. The inlet
valves were enlarged, whilst the main and big end bearings were uprated to cope
with the increased engine speeds. These changes raised the output of the engine
from 75BHP to 110BHP at 6100rpm, and maximum torque was increased to
101lb ft at 5000 rpm. As the figures suggest, the new engine’s peak power was
produced at the top end of the rev-range, which coupled with the engines inherent
eagerness to rev, forced the inclusion of a rev limiter with a cut-out set at 6900
rpm.

Following lengthy testing, an airdam was added under the bumper at the front of
the car to improve stability at speed. To offset the subsequent reduction in airflow
over the ‘sump’, an oilcooler was mounted to the side of the radiator. Placed
directly in the air-stream, it helped reduce the higher oil temperatures of the newly
tuned engine. Unlike the generation of similar cars that would soon follow in the
GTI’s footsteps, no other spoilers were fitted to the Golf.

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A variety of airdams and ailerons were tested, but were ultimately rejected as
their marginal benefits were outweighed by their weight and detriment to the car’s
appearance. As demonstrated later, the prudence of this decision to keep the car
subtle is undoubtedly a significant factor in the GTI’s success.

With a resultant fifty-seven percent power increase over the standard 1600 Golf,
Volkswagen’s engineers wisely uprated the braking system. The solid front discs
were replaced with ventilated items, whilst a larger servo was included to provide
greater pedal assistance. For increased braking safety a load-proportioning valve
was fitted to the rear suspension beam. The valve linked between the car and the
suspension, directly apportioned rear braking effort according to load in the rear
of the car. Under hard braking, the system would automatically lessen braking at
the rear as the car began to dive at the nose, thus preventing premature and
dangerous rear brake lock.

The ‘Sport Golf’ retained the standard car’s basic suspension arrangement but in
a highly uprated format. The MacPherson struts at the front were fitted with
Bilstein dampers which offered greater damping rates, whilst the springs were
made stiffer and shortened by twenty millimetres.

The bottom of the two front struts were then linked together with an anti roll bar to
increase stability under hard cornering. At the rear of the car the trailing arm
suspension arrangement was also supplemented by the addition of a further anti
roll bar. Once more the damping rate was changed and the springs were
shortened. To complete the suspension transformation, the car was equipped
with 175 section tyres on 5½-inch rims in place of the standard 155 tyres and 5-
inch rims. According to measurements taken by Volkswagen engineers at the
time, these modifications served to cut the maximum roll angle whilst cornering
from 6.5°, to under 4.5°. At the same time the maximum sustainable cornering-
force attainable at a steady speed was raised from 0.73g to an impressive 0.81g
(Motor 1976 p 7).

A limited run of 5000 cars was given the go-ahead by Volkswagen’s ‘still
unimpressed marketing department’ (What Car? 1996 p2) and a prototype
wearing a GTI badge for the first time was unveiled in August 1975. The first
production Golf GTIs made their public debut one-month later at the Frankfurt
Motorshow.



Fig 1.11:
The 1976 limited edition Golf ‘GTI’ (Source: Blunsden 1992 p22)

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Document Outline

• The Eighties environment
• The high volume Golf

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