The Volkswagen GTI was our Hero ft. Malcolm Gladwell

Proud VW evangelists Malcolm Gladwell and Eddie agitate for a reappraisal of the VW GTI as a historically monumental vehicle—at least to Gen Xers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey Eddie here, before we get started, I wanted
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ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You'll also
get access to detours, bonus episodes of Car Show where
we go for extended drives, play outtakes and more fine

(00:37):
Pushkin Plus on the Car Show page, in Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot fm. Man, it was great to
be a teenager in the eighties. There was hair metal,
new wave and wrap, Diehard, Ferris Bueller and Alf and

(01:00):
there was no shortage of gods to pray to. One year,
I had these three posters on my bedroom walls. One
for Eric b and Rock Kim's and Mark Debut paid
in full, one for the launch of Stratos Rally Car,
and one of the Maxel tape guy in the armchair
getting his hair blown back by the sweet jams coming
out of his speakers. It was a glorious time. All

(01:31):
those posters were aspirational, thankfully for everyone's sake. I would
never be a rapper, I'd never own a Stratos, and
my stereo system was a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman. All
those things on the posters out of reach What did
seem reasonable and what I thought I could maybe get

(01:53):
my parents to buy me or possibly even by myself,
was a couple year old Volkswagen GTI. The GTI was
our attainable icon, the car every mountain deuced swelling car
giftbox receiving Janz sport toating suburban teenager wanted. It wasn't

(02:15):
overtly sporting like a Camaro or a Mustang, but those
were unrealistically expensive to ensure. Besides, they were parental kryptonite.
No right thinking adult would let their kid drive a
stoplight dragster like a Camaro. Based on the Workaday VW Golf,
the GTI was under the radar. It didn't look like

(02:36):
a sports car because it had a hatchback. It didn't
have sportscar power either, just a little more than a
hundred horses. But the GTI was fast because it was
light about two thousand pounds when a Camaro weighed a
good fifty percent more So. Yeah, it didn't look like
a sports car, but it definitely looked cool, upright and angular.

(03:00):
It was echoing the Bunnyman to the Camaro's Bachman turner overdrive.
It had blacked out wheels and a thin red frame
for the grill. You could get your stuff in it,
you could get your friends in it, you could get
your friends stuff in it. In more than just its
space efficiency, the GTI was a trojan horse. Where most

(03:22):
people saw a small economy car, the clued up car
kid saw an autobun cruiser in miniature. To drive, the
GTI was to fold into the slip stream of those
European performance car heroes like the AMG Hammer or the
BMW M six, pair of dark Sergetti's on your face,
pack of red dunghills in the center console, livin euro style.

(03:56):
The GTI was a gen x icon. For proof, look
no further than its leading thinker, Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is
an avowed GTI man. He sums up the car's essence concisely.
It's like that spoils you for other cars, like having
owned them for so long. My expectation of what a

(04:18):
car should be able to do be a daily driver,
being sandy, fun to drive, have a lot of room
in it, not be that expensive, get you cat's knowledge
all in one package, and every other car like fails
on one of those counts. I'm Eddie Alterman and this

(04:43):
is Car Show, my podcast about why we drive what
we drive. In this episode, we'll talk about how VWS
GTI was a radically different kind of performance car for
a new generation of car enthusiasts with absolutely zero precedent,
but also conversely that it was almost exactly like the

(05:03):
definitive American muscle car, the Pontiac GTO. This is the
untold story of how the GTI is. Generation X is GTO.

(05:36):
Malcolm and I are at the wheel of a twenty
twenty two Volkswagen GTI, now in its eighth generation. Over
the years, Malcolm has owned several Gtis and it's even
more powerful sibling, the Golf are A quick note before
we go any further. The VW hatchback comes in three flavors,
ascending an intensity, the mild yet wild Golf, the flame

(06:01):
and hot GTI and the ghost pepper scorcher the Golf R.
But the GTI is the sweet spot, the original hot Hatch.
Malcolm got hooked on these VW Hatchbacks when he moved
to New York City, trading his Lexus Sportsdan for something
more practical and parkable, and so I got a GTI

(06:23):
had two Gtis and had urs ever since. And you
know once you started an coming back. There's a great
scene in that Netflix drive to Survive special or Carlos
signs he was driving from McLaren at the time and
he said, you know, everybody asked me, what do you drive?

(06:44):
What McLaren do you drive? He goes, I'll drive mc golf. Nice.
The GTI reimagined the performance car along rational lines rather
than emotional ones. Before the little, fuel efficient, space efficient
and mass efficient VW performance cars were either burbling sleds

(07:05):
from Detroit with big V eights upfront and smoking rear tires,
or they were swoopy European coups like Porsches and Ferraris,
with lofty price tags and equally lofty top speeds. The
seeds of the GTI lie in both. Like those European coups,
it was built to cover alpine roads at terrifying speeds,

(07:28):
but believe it or not, its stronger kinship is to
the flat lands of Detroit. The GTI took a boxy
and conservative car, the Golf, and shot it full of
performance enhancing drugs. This is the pattern by which most
Detroit muscle came to be, most notably the Pontiac Gto.
The Gto started as a mid sized Tudor family sedan

(07:52):
ambitiously badged the Tempest, but it was no force of nature.
Mild as Mayo. The Tempest was built for pipe smoking,
arrow shirt wearing insurance salesman, but subversive elements within Pontiac
conspired to turn this humble commune box into the definitive
muscle car, and not via any official, approved route. Something

(08:16):
uncannily similar happened with the GTI. They've stopped making GTOs
Pontiacs two, but the GTI is now eight generations old
in counting, and it still feels daring and subversive. The
funny thing is Volkswagen arrived at this perfectly attuned, entirely

(08:40):
new kind of performance car almost by accident. But before
we get to how the GTI changed the world, we
have to talk about the car on which it is based,
the VW Golf. The Golf was built to usurp the
aging Volkswagen Beetle. The Beetle was sort of the car
Germans were issued at birth. It basically came with a

(09:01):
pair of leaderhosen in the trunk and a jar of
stewed cabbage in the glove box, but by the nineteen
seventies it really needed replace sing The Beatle was commissioned
by Hitler, and in postwar Germany it began to carry
the stench of it, plus it was old. The first
Beatles came out in nineteen thirty eight. By the nineteen sixties,

(09:24):
America seemed to like the Beatle more than Germany did.
Sales of the Beatle in America almost doubled in the
mid sixties, from over two hundred nineteen sixty three to
around four hundred thousand just five years later. Credit the
hippie ascendency. To me, this has always been a hilarious

(09:44):
irony of the Beatle in America. Hitler's car somehow became
our symbol of peace and love. Part of this rebranding
was due to compelling advertising that position the Beatle as
the smaller, smarter antidote to the land yachts pumped out
by Detroit's factories. Never wish your car didn't gobled so
much gas. The Volkswagen cuts most gas bills in half.

(10:11):
Never wish you owned a Volkswagen. But some of it
was due to how cheap and easy the thing was
to own and maintain. To the unshowered anti capitalist. The
beatle was better than an ounce of Wahakin gold. But
as you might imagine, displacing the long running Beetle was

(10:33):
a high stakes affair, so, like any panicking carmaker, VW
turned to the maestro designer, Georgetto Jiujaro to fix the problem. Jiujaro,
an elegant and brilliant Italian, understood automotive beauty in his bones.

(10:53):
He came from a family of Fresco painters and designed
a string of great Alpha Romeos, Ferraris and Maserati's. He
knew proportion and esthetics almost genetically. But he also understood
that a car's design had to work. It had to
fit people comfortably. They needed to be able to see
out of it. They needed somewhere to put their luggage.

(11:16):
It wasn't all about superficial beauty. The true beauty was
in the way it functioned. And what Jujaro turned out
was so deceptively simple that only a genius could have
created it. Engine in the front hatchback in the rear
was straightforward, sharply creased bodywork. This thing of beauty. The

(11:37):
precursor to the GTI was the Gulf We used to
do this thing all of my Canadian cousins Long Islands.
My brother would visit me up here and we would
gather all the sporting cars we have and we would
have a compare like a family really, and so we

(11:58):
would have my cousins nine to eleven whatever. The two
thousand and early all itswine was. We had a second
generation or third generation Mianna. We had my M five,
I've had a boxer back then, my R, my brother's

(12:21):
CTS four and you know, we drive for a couple
of hours and just change cars constantly, and then we
would all kind of do a little bill out, a
little subjective questionnaire. We do it every year. But they
are if you to those who had never driven the
R before, the R was always this revelation. They were

(12:43):
always like, wait, what, that's what that car is? You know,
no one could believe it. It's like it can cover
ground faster than almost anything because there's no waste. It's
like all of the performance in this vehicle is usable.
There's nothing excessive about it. It's all like kind of
perfectly keyed to the to every situation. I don't know

(13:04):
how they do it other than other than you know,
just constant, even of a very good original idea. I mean,
you never feel like you're out of control, you never
feel like it's too fast or too slow. It's just
always sort of perfectly yeah, you know. Sighted. For a while,

(13:29):
the Golf was known in America as the Rabbit, extending
the Beatles wildlife theme. The car's appearance told you what
it did, and it was indeed a bit rabbit like,
ready to hop on the road, canted forward with acres
of glass, the Rabbit Slash Golf was a bright and
modern replacement for the German everyman's car. It was comfortable

(13:53):
to be in and had tons of cargo room inside.
It was a triumph of styling and design. All of
this combined to make the car an instant hit, a
new car for a new Germany. Jujaro called it the
most important design of his career. And like the little
anti hippie I was at the time, I thought this

(14:14):
anti beetle would make the perfect statement about who I
was as a high school junior, function perfectly fused to form.
That's what I wanted to convey to any prospective romantic partner.
Alas my message was lost fast forward to today, as

(14:36):
I'm driving around the Hudson Valley in a brand new GTI.
I'm telling our producer Sam about the first one I
ever owned. You were saying inside that you really wanted
a golf when you were a kid. Yeah. So I
always thought vws were super cool cars. And when I

(14:58):
was a wee pop and my parents were generous enough
to buy me a car, they didn't really understand why
I was so passionate about the golf and why the
golf was so important for my sense of self. And

(15:18):
you know, I remember going car shopping with my dad
and he was like, how about the Chevy Baretta, And
you know, being the ingrade that I was, I was like, no, Dad,
the golf is super cool. You got to drive them both.
And so we drove the Baretta and I really didn't love,
you know, the way it responded. I didn't like the
brake feel. I was a little car snob at the

(15:40):
time and still am. And I didn't feel real comfortable
in the car. And my friend had a Golf that
I had driven a bunch and I really loved it,
and I felt really at ease in the vehicle, really
at home, and I sold my dad on this idea
that I'm going to be a safer driver in the
Golf than I will be in the Baretta, even though

(16:02):
the Baretta was a little bit cheaper. When he drove
the Golf. My dad's a car guy too, He's like, Oh,
I see exactly who you're talking about. This is a
way better car. My dad used to sell cars in
Detroit when he was nineteen years old. He knows what's good,
and he was really impressed with how much space there
was in it, how predictable the steering and breaking felt,

(16:24):
and how easy it was to see out of. He
saw that the fundamentals were right, and they needed to be.
The Golf lineup was overbuilt for suburban kid duty. Even
the basic Golf was engineered to keep up in the
unlimited speed environment of the German Autobahn. The predictability and
fidelity of all the controls, the steering, the breaking, the

(16:48):
shifter were there to give the driver confidence at high speed,
because you don't want surprises at one hundred miles an hour.
You want an overabundance of competence and efficiency of movement
yours and the cars. That's what the Golf always represented
to me, a sort of a thinking man's economy car,

(17:08):
and I think it still is. I think that's one
of those things that's really persistent. You know a lot
of economy cars come and go, but the Golf is
pretty resolute GTI especially, and you know, driving this one,
you still really feel all those great values. If you
were to shut your eyes metaphorically not literally, sere driving,

(17:35):
can you still see and feel and put yourself in
in your first Golf? Yeah? I And this one brings
back a lot of memories. You know, there's a certain
family resemblance in the way that the steering feels, the
way the car rides, the way you sit in it,
the way you look out of it. The driving position
is still so so good, and it's really just still

(17:58):
a driver's car, and you feel those sort of echoes
of the past and this one. As the Golf and
GTI have aged, their capabilities have expanded in every dimension.
They've become faster, yet more fuel efficient, tidier handling, yet

(18:20):
with more space inside. It's a paradox of a machine
and a paragon of evolution. The car Jujarro drew was
right from the start because it was an expression of

(18:43):
the car's purpose. That's why it has lasted. It was
a new kind of family car with a radical repackaging
of the family and cargo inside. It wasn't a typical
Tudor or four door with trunk design. It had a
new form and carried a new modern message. Now you
might find it weird that I keep referring to the

(19:04):
Golf as a family car, because it isn't one. In
America Germany though, it's a totally different story. As I
told Malcolm, I remember having this meeting in a corporate
boardroom at VW with the chairman of the company, hair

(19:25):
doctor Ferdinand Pech, who was the chairman of the Pea. Yes,
the best car guy of all time, also the most
ruthless and demonic of all car executives. So this steely
eyed you know basically you know Uber group and for
her guy, he gets us solved together in this corporate

(19:49):
boardroom with all of his lieutenants, and he makes his
very short speech and he says, in the future, VW
will compete with Mercedes, and Audie will compete with BMW.
And we're like, yeah, okay, that, okay, I get the
Audie thing that tracks, But VW with Mercedes are you

(20:12):
are you out of your free in mind, Like, what
are you talking about? The VW in the US is
the countercultural car, it's the Beatle. It's not. And it
occurred to I think a lot of us, Like he's
talking about the German conception of what VW is, and
in Germany, this is the family car. This is the

(20:32):
er family car. This is like the camera, this is
like a Malibu or something. And so of course he
would say, well, why can't we take our camera and
turn it into Alexis. We can do that. It's just
the same car in two different contexts, with two different meanings. Well,
are for us a small light tossible to use a

(20:56):
automobile writer's favorite phase phrase, car is a novelty. Yeah.
To them, it's a common place. So that's the distinction.
Like it's like the concept of Terwar. Right, they have
the Alps that run across all of their countries. Yeah,
we have vertical mountains not running through much of America.

(21:20):
So you know, the guys in Detroit who are developing
sporty cars like Camaros and Mustangs, we're doing it within
the context of straight line speed. Yeah, not roads like this,
not these curvy, beautiful off camber you know, mountainous roads,

(21:42):
and you can tell a lot about a car company
based on where it's based. The original proving grounds at
General Motors was a road like pretty much a straight road. Yeah,
that's hilarious until Bob Let's build there. It's like, that's
what you guys, right, it's pretty flat. When we come back,

(22:07):
we'll talk about how this family car morphed into Germany's
version of the American muscle car. I'm Eddie Alterman, and
this is car show. The Golf gave Germany its new

(22:30):
family car, something far more advanced than the World War
two Arab Beetle. But that first generation Golf was kind
of slow, and there was political resistance to making it faster.
Here's why. In nineteen seventy three, vw N vailed a
performance version of the Beatle meant to stoke sales. They

(22:52):
called it the GSR or gelb schwarzer Renner, which means
yellow black Racer. It had yellow and black paint front
disc brakes and a terrifying fifty horsepower fifty. It caused
a great stir among the half wearing Burghers of northern Deutschland.
It was so scandalous all this performance that the GSR

(23:16):
caught the attention of the German Parliament, which denounced it
as a menace, an invitation to drive like a maniac.
In the wake of all this, VWS gunshy about adding

(23:38):
more juice to the golf. Kind of funny now when
Germany is making six hundred horsepower super sedans. But there
you have it. The work to boost the golf would
have to be done in secret. A small group of
VW engineers and pr men took the fuel injected one
and ten horsepower engine from the Audi eight GTE and

(24:01):
dropped it into the Golf. They also dressed up the
interior with tartan plaid seats and a dimpled shift knob
like a golf ball. They called it the GTI for
Grand Turismo in nietsione or Grand Tour injection, a reference
to the fuel injected Audi engine, proving that Germans do

(24:21):
have a sense of humor. GTI was also a reference
to the great and beautiful Ferrari gto the swoopiest, sexiest
European racing car ever made. GTO stood for Grand Turismo omolagato,
which means basically a race car that was slightly adapted
to be road legal. VW unveiled the GTI at the

(24:46):
nineteen seventy five International Motor Show in Frankfurt. They hoped
to sell five thousand of the things. They eventually made
more than four hundred and fifty thousand, and that's just
the first generation car. This new faster, dressed up golf
was a certified hit, so much so that the letter's

(25:06):
GTI became shorthand for any kind of performance hatchback pougeot opal.
Even Suzuki drafted onto the popularity of the VW model
with gtis of their own. The hot hatch segment at
birth is still going strong. The eighth generation car Malcolm
and I are driving competes with cars from Honda, Hyundai, Toyota,

(25:31):
you name it. Gen Xers gravitated toward these cars because
they were affordable, approachable, and low key. Fund They defined
performance as something other than just pure horsepower. They were
about handling, steering, breaking, you know, stuff American performance cars
couldn't do at the time, And stylistically, they were the

(25:52):
complete opposite of those American silverbacks. They were rational and
usable hatchbacks instead of trunks, four cylinders instead of eight,
front wheel drive instead of rear drive, These were cars
of the Reagan era. They just said no to drugs.

(26:13):
Junior Republicans and yuppies in training bought them in order
to make themselves seem more interesting. Alex P. Keaton would
have driven one of these on his way up to
a BMW three twenty five. Even those of us with
no political affiliation thought salvation lay in those tartan plaid seats.
We wanted something different out of our performance cars than

(26:36):
our parents did. We wanted smart performance rather than just
brute tire roasting force. Did you want a GTI when
you were getting yours? Oh? I wanted a GTI so badly.
There was a generational shift that the GTI captured in
terms of what a performance car looked like, what it
handled like, what it could be was not going to

(26:56):
bite you in the same way that a thirty two
for a hot rod or you know, a crazy suit
up muscle car. You know, those cars were just really chaotic.
This one's not. This one's tight and trim and very orderly,

(27:17):
and it's like, you know, this is not a classic
rock car. This is a new wave car. This is
a synth car, this is not you know, this is
not Hendricks at Monterey. This is depeche Mode and Glastonbury.
But what if one day you were reading Rolling Stone
or Mojo and found out that Depeche Mode claimed that

(27:40):
its biggest influence, both melodically and harmonically was Jimmy Hendrix.
Would your mind be blown? It's not true, by the way,
just trying to make a point, But that's sort of
what's happening here. And here is where my argument steps
out on a tight rope. For though the GTI was

(28:01):
a new kind of performance car, it was also, the
more you look at it, akin to an old kind
of performance car, the original muscle car, the Pontiac Gto
we talked about earlier. But before we get to how
the GTI is both like and unlike the original muscle car,
we must define our terms. What's a muscle car? Anyway?

(28:26):
This question lands, like so many before it, on the
doorstep of one John z Delrian, you know his eponymous
car from Back to the Future Stuck Party. You made
it down. Welcome to my latest experiment. This is a
big one, the one I've been away before all my life.

(28:48):
Ah well, there it's a Dolrian rare party. All your
questions will be answered. Roll tape before Delrian became famous
for his silvery going sports car and the cocaine deal
Gone Bad meant to fund it. He was the boy
Wonder of Detroit. A child of Romanian and Hungarian immigrants,
he was the youngest person ever to run a GM division.

(29:10):
He became Pontiac's boss when he was just forty. He
was his generations Mark Zuckerberg, a world mover, and like
zuck he looked like the whimpiest officer in the Roman legion.
He got to the top of Pontiac because he was
a risk taker and a great engineer. More specifically, he

(29:30):
got to the top of Pontiac because he created the
gto back when Delorian was merely Pontiac's chief engineer. In
the sixties, General Motors had what they called a racing band.
It meant that, for the sake of good corporate citizenship,
no division would campaign racing cars. As part of this

(29:51):
the emphasis of performance, GM set strict rules about what
size engine could go into which size road car. Could
Pontiac just put its biggest V eight in its mid
sized Tempest. No, The biggest engine was for the biggest cars,
the Bonneville and the Catalina. De Lorian didn't really give

(30:15):
a shit what the rules were. With Pontiac and the
rest of GM out of racing. He was going to
build Pontiac's reputation by building performance cars for the street.
GM restrictions said that the biggest engine that could go
into a midsize car like the Tempest was the five
point four Leader V eight, but de Lorians circumvented this

(30:37):
rule by making the big six point four Leader engine
from the Catalina and the Bonneville an option on the
order sheet rather than a whole separate car. He made
it possible for customers to make their own V eight
powered Monster sedan order code number three eighty two. He
called it the Pontiac Tempest, Lamon's gto midsize family car,

(31:04):
Clandestine Project Big Engine. Any of this sounding familiar, The
Pontiac was not certified for racing, not officially anyway, but
it was an outlaw drag racer on Detroit streets like
Gratchett and Woodward Avenues. With his gto, Delorian made his

(31:26):
intentions and pretensions clear, though a few pet ants might
say that the first muscle car was something like the
Oldsmobile Rocket eighty eight or the Chrysler three hundred from
the fifties. I wouldn't. The muscle car was a movement,
a cultural phenomenon. The GTO is generally considered the first

(31:48):
of them because it launched a category that still means turnkey,
affordable American performance. In its first year nineteen sixty four,
Pontiac sold nearly thirty five thousand of them, the next
year seventy five thousand, the year after that, almost one
hundred thousand. It was a legitimate sensation. Some sporting cars

(32:12):
are only boasto is bald tiger a nimble one of
the wide tracked tigers from Bonniac GTO. It's also fair

(32:35):
to say that it gave an outlet for the pent
up frustrations of a newly liberated generation. The muscle car
was the male expression of the sexual revolution. When women
were burning bras, men were buying Pontiacs built for power
and straight line speed. The GTO broke the dam. It

(32:56):
meant an unshackling of primal urges. Burbling V eight exhaust
notes were mating calls. Tire smoke would roast the marshmallow men.
No longer would young Turks have to shave their faces
and cut their hair short. No more skinny ties in
bill cream they could walk around in sheepskin. Then invests

(33:18):
and get away with it. In the movie Dazed and Confused.
Richard Link later captures this unbridled maleness perfectly in the
form of Matthew McConaughey's character Wooterson. Here's Woodson outside the
emporium pool Hall, describing the chevelle he called Melbote toast.

(33:41):
Let me tell you what Melbote toasts packing. Right here.
I've got four eleven pozzy track out back, seven fifty
double pumper edelbrock In takes poured over thirty eleven to
one pop up pistons, turbo jet three ninety horsepower. We're
talking some bucking muscle. Hey man, I know you got
this thing out of it. Because the gto was so popular,
a flurry of ever faster cars followed it, Dodge Chargers

(34:04):
and Plymouth Kudas, Oldsmobile four four twos and Chevy Challs
like water sins, all of them chunky two door sedans
with big V eights under the hood and rear wheel
drive out back two doors, midsize car V eight that
is the muscle car template, and none shall veer from it.

(34:27):
Purists brooke no deviation from this formula. To hear a
muscle car, person, tell it a Camaro or a Mustang
isn't even a muscle car. It's a pony car, damn it.
Get it straight. Too swoopy, too small, too equine in name.
Neither is anything with four doors a muscle car. This

(34:48):
is an orthodoxy worthy of the Crusaders. If you don't
believe me, go on the internet some time and try it.
Never in a million years with today's satin jacketed muscle
car faithful ever call the GTI an heir to the
Pontiac gto the gto sired the HEMI Cuda, not some

(35:08):
puny European runabout. But I invoke the mighty Pontiac gto
here in this episode on the VWGTI. Not just because
it's almost the same three letters with the same Ferrari inspiration.
It's because they have the same origin story, They arose
out of almost the exact same clandestine circumstances, and they

(35:31):
are based on the same kind of car, not in
terms of form, but in terms of function. They were
both family cars reimagined as performance machines, and both took
off like ornerary race horses. Both had the same segment
spawning impact. They tapped into something unexpected, a latent yearning

(35:54):
from newly licensed kids, kids who tweaked them, raced them,
and made them legends. So why is any of this important?
Because youthful freedom takes many forms, but the spirit is
the same. Get out of the house fast. It's going

(36:14):
to happen, whether anyone likes it or not. Two family cars,
two hot engines, two segments created, two generations, served one
ocean between them. Yes, Indeed, the GTI was our gto.

(36:56):
Car Show is written and hosted by me Eddie Alterman.
It's produced by Sam Dingman, Jacob Smith and Amy Gaines.
Our editor is Jen Guera. Original music mastering by Benaliday.
Our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Our show art was

(37:16):
designed by Sean Karney and airbrushed by Greg la Fever.
Our patron saints are Leetal Malad and Justine Lange. Special
thanks to the folks of Volkswagen for loaning us the
GTI and extra special thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for writing along.
Car Show is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you

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