Volkswagen Scirocco GT | Shed of the Week
The third-generation Scirocco finally breaks its shed duck – albeit in oil burner format
By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 29 September 2023 / Loading comments
Remember all the excitement in 2008 when the third-generation VW Scirocco came out? Twitter was only two years old at the time. Shed has never knowingly twitted in his life so he’s staying out of this one, but even if ‘trending’ wasn’t yet a thing in ’08 it was still a fitting word for the hullabaloo that surrounded the successor to the 1974 Giugiaro-penned, Karmann-built type 1 and the also rather nice in-house-designed 1981 type 2, Giugiaro’s drawings for the follow-up having been torched for being too boring.
Both of those first two Sciroccos were built on the Mk1 Golf platform. The 1988 gen-three Scirocco turned out to be not a Scirocco at all but a Corrado, again designed in-house but this time based on the Mk2 Golf. Again it was a handsome little thing and quite a goer too in VR6 or supercharged G60 guise, but it wasn’t hugely successful.
All three of these 2+2 coupes gathered strong followings, so devotees were getting quite moist at the prospect of a Scirocco return. The eventual arrival in mid-2008 of the Mk 5 Golf-platformed car did indeed prompt strong sales in both the private and fleet sectors, but the fat-bottomed Scirocco quietly disappeared in 2017 after a decent nine-year run and a midlife facelift in 2014. Why? Well, if you asked anyone who mattered at VW they said it was nicking sales from the fast Golf range. They didn’t seem to mind that when half a million Mk1 Sciroccos were being sold. Perhaps nobody noticed or cared though because for every Mk1 Scirocco going out of the door there would be fourteen Golfs going out of another much wider one, as our John pointed out in his recent piece on a Mk1 Scirocco Storm.
As the last Scirocco (probably a 276hp R, or maybe a 217hp GTS) was leaving the line in 2017 there was some half-hearted conciliatory chat from Wolfsburg about giving the coupe thing another go sometime in the future, maybe, but when the future inconveniently arrived three years later and some journo reminded them about it the VW spokeshuman made its excuses and left. So, Scirocco devotees, donโt be holding your breath.
The 2009 pre-facelift car we’ve got for you is a 2.0-litre diesel. This would have been anathema to many dyed-in-the-wool Scirocco fans, but you have to remember that diesel cars weren’t always the world-ending pariahs that they are now. There was a 141hp fuel-sipping version of that 2.0 engine, but there was also a high-performance one, as per this one here, which pumped out 168hp plus a plumptious 258lb ft between 1,750 and 2,500rpm. With 1,395kg to pull those stats made it good for a 0-62mph time of 8.1sec and a top speed of 138mph, numbers that you could of course cheaply reduce and increase respectively via a spot of remapping. In standard spec, the 168hp motor returned over 53mpg on the official combined cycle and nearly 66mpg on the extra-urban one.
The vendors have put our shed down as an automatic, but unless Shed’s eyes are deceiving him again or VW sneakily brought out a three-pedal DSG when he wasn’t looking he’s pretty sure it’s a six-speed manual. Which is good because DSG problems aren’t cheap to fix.
Now, for this sort of money โ ยฃ1,895, which is at least ยฃ600 below the typical starting price for these โ you can’t expect perfection. For a start, this is a leggy ‘un at 187,000 miles. The bodywork has seen some action, it has aftermarket wheels and Ditchfinder tyres, the belts and water pump are 80,000 miles old and the MOT runs out in mid-November.
On the positive side, the MOT history is non-worrying, with almost all of the advisories being for consumables. 80k is bang on the recommended belt replacement interval, so you should be OK for a bit longer yet on that score until you can rustle up the ยฃ400 or so that an indie will charge you for the work. Hence the price being asked for the car, presumably, which is fair. Donโt wait too long though as the tensioners are a bit fragile. It would also be good to see some reassuring paperwork on remedies for carbon buildup, injector trouble and DPF failure. With this mileage, you’d like to think that these are all in the past, but we always need to be aware of Trigger’s Broom syndrome.
Nicer wheels and tyres will be easy to find and de-scraping the body is just a rattle can away. Tailgate support struts conk out and there wasn’t much room in the back but if you folded the rear seats down you had a useful 750 litres to shove your bike in. That’s assuming the boot latch mech was still working of course, as they were known for giving trouble. Even with everything sorted, you’ll probably still hear the rattles and squeaks that are par for the Scirocco course. Some of these can be difficult to remedy. Like Shed says though, there are some noises you just have to learn to live with.
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