On Sunday just gone we took the long drive up to Belfast to attend Dubshed. After a long drive up from Waterford in the rain, which made the journey worse, we arrived at King’s Hall, Belfast. We parked the car and made our way into one of the three sheds to see what Dubshed had to offer us this year.
This car was bought as a run around, the owner of this pretty immaculate looking mk3 Vento had family in mind. Owning a MK2 Rallye, the Vento would become the more practical day to day car. As most of you out there will agree, nothing ever stays standard for too long and before Noel knew it he was in talks of getting some rust removed from the car….
There is a new breed of car enthusiasts, some of you may be reading this and laughing while others might agree, as Ireland experiences some sort of melt down, which we won’t go on about, a new collection of enthusiasts who are armed with the websites, blogs, and forums are starting to come up through the ranks pretty quickly. The Polo has always been a car which has mostly taken a back seat to the rest of the Volkswagen family, most of the time when these were “modified”… well you can probably picture what it would have looked like…..
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What I love about Japfest is the amount of racing and activities that are on throughout the day as well as the show thats inside the paddock. It can be a somewhat overhwleming task to cover everything as you have time attack, Prodrift, drag racing and track time on all at the same time. There’s something for everyone.
The level of cars at Dubshed was very surprising to be honest. Most of the cars both inside and outside the sheds were top notch. Even in the picture above you can get a glimpse of just how fantastic the penis on the roof of this Passat was. The attention to detail was superb.
We decided to take the trip up to Dubshed up the North of Ireland. Having missed it the year before I really wanted to make sure to get it up on the site this time around. As I’ve said many times, the Japanese car scene dominates the south of Ireland. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, to each his own but the intentions of making Juicebox in the first place was to get a good mix of decent cars on the website which represent to finer parts of the Irish car culture. Finding a decent VW down the south really is a hard mission. Yes they do exist. But usually their owners aren’t the type of people to have them on show or really bring them around too often to be photographed. Even finding them online is quite the challenge. We ended up seeing so many car’s from the south at the show which left us scratching our heads wondering where they had come from!
I was told of a small VW meet which was happening close to home so I decided to tag along and see what would show up.
This VW caddy was one of the first on the scene. The Mercedes Flat 15 Slot’s looked awesome under the arches. Funny enough they were hand polished and took over two weeks!
Its no secret that the Japanese scene has a bigger following in Ireland then the German when it comes to cars, but in saying that the German car following has really come on again in the past few years with the younger generation. There seems to be cars popping up all over the place and its a different take to the older generation who appreciate the more standard looking car. We decided to head to the Treacy’s in Portlaoise meet which had been organised by members of Vagdrivers.net. I really wanted get more of a variety up on the site, and the Portlaoise meet would show the variations in styling from the different generations of enthusiast of the VAG scene.