The first of the VW racers

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At the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins. Transportation was virtually impossible to find, with no new private cars being built and only a handful of those that had survived the hostilities in serviceable condition. The easiest way into private car ownership, for an enterprising German, was building from scratch. The countryside was littered with wrecked Volkswagen Kübelwagens, which proved to be an excellent basis for a home-made motor car. So many of these specials were constructed that a word to describe them quickly entered the lexicon: eigenbau, literally 'self-made'.

It wasn't long before Germans were tuning the VW engine and creating competition cars on this unlikely base, and one of the very first to do so was Petermax Müller. He has escaped the Russian-occupied zone by swimming across the freezing River Elbe to reach the West, and was soon hard at work turning the humble Kübelwagen into a race winner. By the time he was finished with it, the engine was producing more than double the power, with each head fed by its own tiny Solex carburetter and a 14.7 to one compression ratio. Housed in an ultra-low streamlined alloy body, the cars (Müller built six in total) were virtually unbeatable, their constructor winning more than 60 races in the cars over a fairly short period.

Delwyn Mallett was lucky enough to get behind the wheel of a survivor, and he tells the full story of these remarkable home-built racers in the latest issue of The Automobile, which you can buy from their website here.

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