Some cars are bought to be sold. Travis Washay bought this one during spring break of his freshman year of college. A theft recovery out of Massachusetts, no wheels, missing the front spoiler. Cheap enough to make sense for a kid flipping Volkswagens to cover tuition and fund a racing habit he couldn't quite afford. The plan was to sort it and move it along.
The plan fell apart immediately.
He kept it. Built it. Won things in it. That was around 1991. He still has it.
To understand why that matters, you have to understand what the GTI was to begin with. Volkswagen arrived in America in 1974 with the Rabbit, a practical and inexpensive replacement for the Beetle that suited the era just fine. Sensible. Useful. Nothing more. In Europe, 1976 brought the GTI, and the conversation changed entirely. Here was an affordable small car that could be driven with genuine enthusiasm. Not a sports car with the edges sanded off. Not a performance car dressed up as an economy car. The real thing, just differently packaged. It became the template for every hot hatch that followed, a segment that didn't exist before it and hasn't stopped growing since. The idea was simple and it was radical: you shouldn't have to choose between practical and fun. You shouldn't need Ferrari money to feel something behind the wheel.
When the GTI finally arrived in the United States in 1983, it brought with it a 1.8-liter single-cam engine making 89 horsepower, a close-ratio gearbox, and a character completely distinct from the standard Rabbit. Red pinstriping on the doors. Velour seats with a center stripe. A red accent on the dash. Everything about it announced itself. "You knew you got a GTI," Travis says. "There was no faking it."
Travis's car is one of those first American examples, and the early 1983 models carried the closest gear ratios of the entire run. Short, stacked, always pulling, always in the right rev range. It made modest numbers feel like more. The SCCA figured this out quickly. So did an entire generation of drivers who couldn't afford a sports car but had the same instincts. Travis had started autocrossing in high school in a red Rabbit GTI, working up through SCCA's ranks before moving into Street Prepared class. When this 83 came along it fit the class, fit the budget. Regional championship followed. Then the National Tour championship. First real victories, this car. "I've never felt so comfortable, so excited, so consumed by something that never wears thin on me," he says. That's a considerable thing to say about anything.
The wheels deserve their own moment. A friend tracked down a set on Craigslist up in Burlington, Vermont and called Travis immediately. Three-piece BBS magnesium, as it turned out, factory Audi motorsport issue. The kind of find that has no business showing up on Craigslist, on a car that has no business wearing them, and yet there they are. Exactly right.
Lime Rock came later. A friend's father was an instructor there and brought Travis in as a guest for a track day. First laps ever, in this car. "It's still one of the greatest days of my life," he says. He runs a racing and driver development operation out of Lime Rock now, the same track where this car first showed him what a day on track felt like.
These GTIs are getting scarce. Not Rabbits, Volkswagen built those by the millions, but the GTIs, the ones driven hard and maintained with care and kept alive through decades of sourcing parts that get harder to find every year. The ones that survive do so because someone decided they were worth the trouble and kept deciding that, season after season. Most didn't make it. Rust, neglect, accidents, the slow arithmetic of time and indifference. The survivors are something else now, artifacts of a moment when a small German car rewired what people thought driving could be.
Travis has been making that decision for 34 years. He jokes that the car is his coffin. His two boys love it too, and he hopes it passes to them someday, and beyond.
It was supposed to be a flip. Some things have other plans.
For now, the car will still race. Come check him, and other historic cars at out Lime Rock Raceway Historic Festival over labor day weekend.
