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Category: Scirocco 4motion (page 1 of 2)
Photo: Scirocco in November 2013, still FWD.
In Finnish first:
Konvertoimme Scirocco R:n nelivetoiseksi, hankimme siihen Trafilta poikkeusluvan ja muutoskatsastimme. Suomen ensimmäinen katulaillinen neliveto-Scirocco on siis totta. Projektikertomus tästä tulee olemaan englanniksi, koska kiinnostusta on ollut ulkomaita lähtien. Suomeksi tarinaa löytyy ffp:n keskustelupalstalta.
OK, let’s get back to English. Although this website is mainly in Finnish, we decided to write this project in English, as there’s been some international interest on this.
Car modification is very controlled in Finland. The law is strict, especially for modern cars. If you want to keep the car legal, in many cases you need to get a special permit from authorities. And it’s not easy to get, it involves a lot of paperwork and paperwork is not the ambition of car enthusiast… that’s why many give up and either keep the modifications secret or don’t even bother. We didn’t give up and decided to give it a shot and see if we could convert a mk3 Scirocco to all wheel drive and still keep it street legal. Hopefully this works as an example for other fanatics and encourages them to build their dream cars and still be able to drive them on our every day racking and ruining roads.
The whole thing started in late 2013 when the author (Heikki) sold his Superb and bought a 2011 Scirocco R. Friends tried to warn, winter was coming and it would be no fun to drive a fwd car after Superb V6 which had AWD. And man they were right. I tool less than a month when we started to build a vision of converting the Scirocco to AWD. We knew that Scirocco is based on the same platform as mk6 Golf (PQ35). We didn’t know exactly how similar they were, but had a gut feeling that the project should be doable: Take the drivetrain from Golf and mount it on Scirocco.
Originally we were looking for just the drivetrain but eventually decided that it was safest to buy a more complete car in case we needed some parts we didn’t know we needed. And we’re glad we did. We started to look for wrecked mk6 Golf R’s, as they were the closest match to Scirocco R. Finally we found one good donor car from Sweden. At that time there was a WRC rally in Sweden, so we decided to take a long weekend trip and see the rally, buy the car and bring it to Finland with us .
During next couple of weeks we’ll try to describe what and how we did. Now, after the job is done, it’s easy to say it’s not that difficult at all. But when we started it, we didn’t really have any examples available, we had to figure out many things just by ourselves. Not to forget the paperwork that is required to get the permit.
Hope you will enjoy and leave feedback for us! If you want to know something more, leave us a question!
pajalle.com team
As we wrote on the opening post, we went to Sweden to see a WRC rally and while we were there, we bought a crashed 2010 Golf R. Big part of the parts were already sold (including doors and interior), but it still had exactly what we needed: drivetrain and some body parts that we needed. The engine was extra, but we believed it’s easy to sell.
It was not that easy though, the breakers was not allowed to sell the whole car… to avoid that some crazy Finns would repair a car that has been ruled for demolishing. So we had to ”destroy” it first. We decided to cut the roof off – we thought we might use some other parts like pillars and sills for some other car repair.
We tried to cut the A-pillar, but that wasn’t easy due to reinforcements inside.
February 13th we were back to Finland and Pekka’s garage. Golf on one lift and Scirocco on another – we were finally able to compare how different the cars were.
So we had Golf the donor car at Pekka’s garage. We did some quick comparison to Scirocco and didn’t see anything too difficult. We’d been comparing already from ETKA and it was pretty much as we expected. The trunk floor was clearly different, otherwise the body was pretty much similar. It looked that we’re able to cut the trunk floor from Golf and swap it to Scirocco. It was time to tear the Golf down.
Finally we were able to make some space to the garage and bring Scirocco back in.
We also had to tear down the dash partly – some wiring needed to be connected inside the dash (more about that later).
Next we decided to change the gearbox. Unfortunately we were so busy doing the actual job we forgot to take a lot of pictures. Anyway, first we had to drop down the subframe – together with steering gear.
It would have been a clever move to remove the steering wheel too – my 4 year old son had too much fun ”driving” the car and while the steering wheel was now free to rotate as many cycles as he wanted, he broke the slip ring behind the steering wheel…
While the engine was supported from the top side, it was now easy to remove the gearbox and replace with the box from Golf. We compared the Scirocco and Golf gearboxes and they were identical (including gear ratios), the only difference is Golf’s angle drive.
In next post we’ll replace the trunk floor.
As described on earlier posts, pretty much the only major body modification needed for 4motion retrofit is replacing the trunk floor with a floor from Golf. We did this by following VW’s instructions. The only difference is that in VW’s instructions they use brand new floor, we started by first removing the floor piece from our donor car.
Then it’s time to start cutting the Scirocco…
Golf 4motion has a styrofoam spacer on the trunk to give space for the spare wheel. We’re not going to use that to keep the trunk volume original. We’re going to replace spare wheel with a tire repair kit.
In addition to trunk floor replacement some smaller modifications were still needed. First is the fuel tank.
We can’t just swap the Golf tank to Scirocco. The above photo shows clearly the reason: The filler pipe is different. In Golf the filler cap is way more back (about 20cm). In Scirocco that’s where the rear lamp is located, so we could even think of further body modifications – so we had to modify the tank.
It was also necessary to cut another hole to the floor under the rear seat to get access to the fuel tank. The opening gives access to the second fuel level sender and the wiring to the Haldex controller also goes through this hole.
Finally we’re ready for installing stuff. To be continued…
Finally it was time for fitting the rear axle and other parts of the drivetrain/chassis.