Yes I owned on of these lovely cars, an E reg turbo diesel saloon for just over a year.

I got it as I wanted a cheap diesel commuting car but on a budget of 500 quid.
Compared to a rusty smoking 1.6 Escort diesel and a 1.7D visa with no brakes the regata was an obvious bargin. Electric front windows! Sunroof! Central locking!
Fanatastic heating system display with LEDs that changed colour as you adjusted the temperature! Full set of dials including rev counter to about 7000 rpm (why? it would not rev beyond 3000 rpm).

I was able to haggle the price down as funnily enough the seller was having difficulty getting anyone interested in the car. I put 25,000 miles on the car in about 15 months of use during which I only had to replace part of the exhaust and do oil changes, so pretty reliable from a mechanical point of view. The electrics started to play up of course but mainy just the dash warning lights which could be ignored. The central locking became a problem when it refused to stay locked. The technique in the end was to lock via one of the back doors holding the button down and waiting for the furious clicking to subside before slamming the door. To be honest I don\'t know why I bothered as I\'m sure no one would have stolen it.

I enjoyed driving the car for a time as it had a kind of \'so bad its good\' charisma about it. I could park it anywhere as I didn\'t care if it got vandalised. I could get out of junctions and carve through traffic as others understandably wanted to keep their distance.
Also in the unlikely event that you could get in front of someone who had annoyed you, you could floor it and the turbo would wind up to full boost to deploy a massive cloud of smoke from the rear. And I mean massive. Still passed the emissions tests at MOT time though and returned 48 mpg without fail.

I scrapped it in the end when a repair bill of 400 loomed as I had at that point grown a little tired of the heavy clutch and the gear change that put up a spirited resistance to any change of ratio. Unsurprisingly I couldn\'t give it away and had to pay 20 quid to the scrap man, even after delivering it!

As bad as it was I regretted its passing after its replacement, a Rover 827 Sterling, turned out to be the most unreliable car I have ever owned.

Cheers,

Mat.

many thanks for the input ( and hugely impressive technical info! ) everyone. I guess there could be a "dry weather fault" with my VR6 but it seems to perform well all round really - it just feels a wee bit more eager in damp conditions.
For the record, I think the Golf VR6 is a fine car and great fun to drive, notwithstanding that the handling could be a lot better ( depends how fast you want to navigate bends though really! ) and clearly other more modern machinery has overtaken it dynamically.

Cheers,
Sparks

Why thank you Mr. Whizz!;-D>



A new petrol head mate informs me the "click" I hear can only possibly emanate from the starter motor as it fails to engage.

So that's one mystery solved, I suppose.

If you want more grunt try the tunit v-cr, this will give around 145bhp?? - I have!!
K2

Thanks guys. Hugo, were you happy with the service (and the engine) you got from Universal? I guess you must have been, otherwise you wouldn't be recommending their services here :-)

RM