Worthersee Tour wrap

The Volkswagen Group brought its full corporate clout to bear at the 33rd annual Worthersee Tour – a four-day extravaganza that attracted around 150,000 Veedub aficionados from all across Europe to the idyllic Austrian town of Reifnitz on the shores of Lake Wörth.

Held every year since 1982 (apart from 1992-94, due to unruly crowd behaviour in previous years), this year’s Tour was nevertheless billed as 33rd edition of the jamboree.

What started out as a small enthusiast meet with fewer than 100 VW Golf GTI owners has snowballed into a massive festival. Thus Worthersee serves as a showcase for the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda brands – although there are a small number of interlopers from other brands.

Apart from having elaborate pavilions and hospitality areas for the Volkswagen Group brands concerned, this year the car-maker trundled out several members of its top brass, including Ferdinand Piech, chairman of the supervisory board of the VW Group, who was made an honorary citizen of the town of Reifnitz by the mayor on the Tour’s opening day.

Tellingly, Dr Piech hinted it was time the VW Group’s premium brands – Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti – also got involved in the Worthersee Tour.

This is significant, as what Dr Piech wants tends to happen at the VW Group, so don’t be surprised to see Porsche and Lambo pavilions at the show over the coming years.

Also present were VW Group chairman Martin Winterkorn, Audi chairman/CEO Rupert Stadler, Audi technical development boss and board member Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi sales/marketing boss and board member Luca de Meo and the boss of Audi’s Quattro division, Heinz Hollerweger.

Each of the four brands concerned also rolled out one or more concepts created especially for the Tour, with VW busting out the jaw-dropping Golf GTI Roadster Vision Gran Turismo created for PlayStation’s Gran Turismo 6 game. Also making their debuts were the GTI Wolfsburg Edition and Golf Variant Youngster 5000.

Another crowd favourite (several showgoers climbed all over it) was the granite GTI monument that has been a permanent fixture at the venue since 1987. Sculpted from a rock imported from Southern Sweden, it’s an abstract representation of a Mk2 GTI that was created by VW’s trainee masons.

VW didn’t just resort to cars and sculptures, as its celebrity guests/brand ambassadors included bodybuilder-turned-actor Ralf Möller, who is apparently just as popular in Austria and Germany as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Austrian pop/rock star Christina Stürmer also got the crowd amped up with a wholehearted live performance on stage.

Over on the Audi stand, the star attraction was the fire-breathing A3 Clubsport Quattro concept that previews the upcoming RS3 sedan, and also garnerning much rubbernecking was the TT quattro sport concept first seen three months ago at the Geneva motor show.

Meanwhile, Skoda unveiled the jacked-up and rugged Yeti Xtreme, seemingly inspired by the rally-raid specials that feature in the Dakar Rally, along with the Citijet, a decapitated version of the Citigo (the Czech brand’s derivative of the VW Up).

Nearby, Seat used its stand to showcase (among other vehicles) the Ibiza Cupster, a radical roofless concept that looks more speedboat than car with its cut-down windscreen and side windows. Purely a design study, it was created to chalk up the 30th anniversary of Seat’s volume-selling Ibiza model.

Although all four brands currently feature in the Worthersee Tour, the skew is still heavily towards VW and Audi, as these two marques made up roughly 60 per cent and 30 per cent respectively of the total cars at the event, with Seat, Skoda and a few miscellaneous brands accounting for the balance.

The customising outlets and aftermarket parts suppliers who specialise in the VW Group brands were also out in force, as this is the only place on earth where they get access to 150,000 potential customers over a four-day period.

The participants’ cars were a diverse bunch, with pristine Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 Golfs and flawless early-model Sciroccos, Corrados, Beetles and Passats appearing alongside an assortment of newer vehicles.

As you’d expect, the cars range from mild to wild. There were some kooky custom jobs, and these included a Mercedes 190E that substituted paintwork with what looked to be faux dog fur. Another eye-opener was a Beetle whose luggage compartment had been converted into a schnapps bar, complete with Jagermeister bottles and shot glasses.

The quality of the cars was variable, but unlike many show-and-shines, where bagging a trophy is the end goal, here the emphasis seems to be more about participating and sharing the spirit and camaraderie of the event.

Amongst it all, a man in olde-worlde German/Austrian clobber meanders through the mass of cars and humanity… riding a penny farthing… while sipping on a beer... Nothing out of the ordinary, in other words.

In terms of its ambience, the Tour is part Goodwood Festival of Speed and part Summernats. Parallels to the latter were provided by the burnout enclosure, where a pair of early-model Golfs – converted to rear-wheel-drive – got the assembled horde whooping and hollering with a joust whereby they went bumper-to-bumper and nailed the gas for a tyre-smokin’ showdown.

One of these rear-driven Golfs, with a grinning Jesus lookalike behind the wheel, then went on a donut frenzy that eventually resulted in one of the rear tyres blowing out. Undeterred, he kept the throttle buried until eventually the whole car was reduced to a smouldering heap that needed to be extinguished by one of the fire marshals. Predictably, this sent the crowd wild.

What’s interesting though is that the crowd was, for the most part, well-behaved and respectful of the cars and others around them, although the atmosphere started to change by late afternoon (as we were exiting), by which time several thousand litres of beer had been collectively consumed by many of the now well-tanked showgoers.

Although the core of the festival is concentrated in one spot in Reiftnitz, you’ll find VW/Audi devotees and their cars all around the entire circumference of the lake, so the whole area is literally invaded by VW/Audi freaks from far and wide.

Also interesting is that the real purists (who usually have the highest-calibre cars) arrive a week or two before the four-day extravaganza and are gone before the mayhem starts. This is to ensure their vehicles leave in the same condition they brought them.

There’s also a second low-key gathering at Wörthersee in September as a belated low-key season finale of the annual car meet.

The show itself creates a few logistical nightmares for Reifnitz’s residents as there are only three roads leading into the town, so the municipality has set a limit of 5000 cars to ensure the whole place doesn’t come to a complete standstill.

There’s obviously plenty of noise and commotion, as well as piles of garbage in the aftermath, so it’s understandable that not all of the town’s residents are fans of the Tour. But that’s bound to be the case with any event of this scale.

As it stands, the Worthersee Tour is a wondrous petrolhead’s paradise that’s eclipsed only by the likes of the Goodwood Festival of Speed as far as atmosphere, carporn and entertainment value are concerned.

It should be on the bucket list of every Volkswagen and Audi aficionado out there.

WORTH A SEE
No less spectacular than the four-day Veedub/Audi fest is the venue where it all takes place. Worthersee (Lake Worth) is an elongated lake with crystal-clear blue-green water that’s about 20 km long and 1–2 km wide.

Stretching from the Carinthian capital Klagenfurt in the east to Velden in the west, it’s flanked by steep alpine foothills covered with dense forests, beyond which you can see snow-capped alpine peaks.

In the early 19th century the marshy shores were home only to a handful of poor peasants, but the subsequent construction of the Austrian Southern Railway (Sudbahn) turned Worthersee into a snooty summer retreat for Vienna’s nobility.

Images: Karl Wiedenhofer and UnitedPictures

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