Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
A few neat ones popped up and caught my attention this week, so here’s the roundup! How about this slick RoW 968 in Riviera Blue? Before you get too excited, it’s a Tiptronic. But it’s also a wacky spec, with blue Porsche-script upholstery, no sunroof, and 17″ Cup wheels.
Comments closedThis is what it’s all about. An obscure high-performance model based on a car you never thought deserved such a treatment made in extremely low…
3 Comments
Nope, we’re not done with the Corrado parade yet! Today’s car combines the sonorous VR6 with a great color, a fantastic collection of special parts, and – for good measure – a Z-Engineering supercharger. Additional goodies include a Schrick intake manifold and camshafts, KW Coilover Variant 3 coilover suspension, AutoTech Sport Tuning braces and brake components, 16″ Speedline wheels, a Euro-style front lip spoiler, E-code headlights, and a Techtonics Tuning exhaust system. It’s just about as close as you can come to a greatest hits album for Corrados, and it has under 40,000 miles. You can probably guess where this is going in terms of price, but let’s take a closer look:
When it launched in the late 1980s as a replacement to the ancient Scirocco, the Corrado was Volkswagen’s attempt to appeal to the Porsche crowd. With the supercharged G60 motor that may have been somewhat farcical, but when VW dropped the narrow-angle 2.8 liter VR6 into the nose of their 2-door Coupe it became more of a reality. Though on paper it didn’t have much more power, the VR6 was better suited to the design and weight of the Corrado. Zero to 60 plummeted nearly a second and top speed went up to a then-impressive 137 mph. But it was the all-around flexibility of the motor that proved the winner; torquey at low revs yet happy to head towards the redline, the Corrado finally fulfilled the promise of being a budget P-car.
Unfortunately, there was a price to pay. The base price for a Corrado in 1992 was nearly $22,000. Add a few options in and you were paying more than you did for a Porsche 924S four years earlier. To put it into even more stark perspective, the base price of a much quicker, nicer, more efficient, better cornering, better braking, more technologically impressive, and significantly safer GTI today is only $28,600 some 29 years later; correct for inflation, and you understand how expensive these hot hatches were. As a result, Corrados and especially the SLC have always held a cult status and higher residual value than the rest of the lineup. Today’s market loves them, as well.
VW’s radical redesign on the B3 resulted in a unique, angular look at still stands apart from the crowd today. And because the internals were based on VW’s A2 chassis like the Corrado, when the 2.8 VR6 debuted in the sporty coupe for ’92 it was only a matter of time until its four-door friend got it too. That happened in ’93 with the release of the GLX VR6. Slow sales resulted in Volkswagen’s refresh of the B4 Passat into the more traditional looking B4 for 1995; which saw new BBS wheels and body styling but the same dynamic performance. Today a clean Emerald Green Pearl Metallic ’96 manual has popped up for sale, and it’s worth a look:
