We’re used to seeing LS engines crammed into every car, truck, and school bus that’s ever been created. Joe Bristow thankfully missed that memo and stuck a Volvo 2.3 liter inline five-cylinder engine into your average Volkswagen Golf MK3. This beautiful misfit known as the “Golvo” makes 900 horsepower and blasts down the track in 8-seconds.
If you saw Bristow at a stoplight behind the wheel of his VW you wouldn’t realize what kind of sleeper you’re sitting next to. The Golf isn’t very flashy, it’s not loud at all, running through a full exhaust, so there’s no hint at just how nasty the car is. Fairfield Garage Louth built the T5R Volvo mill using a reinforced Volvo S60 block. A custom all-wheel-drive system was created so the Quaife QKE45Z sequential gearbox could work with the Sachs triple-disc clutch to send horsepower to the Quaife diffs and Hoosier tires. Bristow tunes the Volvo engine package with a MaxxECU.
Bristow’s Golf has been printing off low 9-second time slips like a bracket car for a while. The goal has been to drop an 8-second pass with the VW for a long time, but Bristow had been fighting traction issues. Bristow took the Golf to the Doorslammers event at Santa Pod Raceway recently to finally get the 8-second monkey off his back. The VW got ahold of the track and laid down a pair of 8.94-second runs at over 158 MPH, and backed those up with an 8.96-second pass. Check out the video from VeeDubRacing that shows just how much of a sleeper Bristow’s Golf really is.
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