Etch a stretch

When fitment, stance, luxury, ICE, family and camping come together, you know you’ve built a 5.1 for everyone

- James Wallace

It’s 6am on a cold and relatively bleak winter’s day. The sun is just about to peep above the Yorkshire hills in the distance and both Van owner, Lee Etches, and our snapper, Adam, are freezing their bits off in the name of VWt. It takes a very special Van to provoke such an early morning raid from one of our most valued snappers, but Lee’s is definitely worth it. Purchased as an ex-demo, 2011, low-mileage minter from a local VW dealer in the middle of 2012, Lee actually traded up from a rather swish (although, as it turned out, largely useless) Porsche 964 to take ownership of this Van, with just a smidge over 8,000 on the clock. “With a couple of littl’uns to squeeze in, the Porsche just sat in the garage doing nothing for a few years,” Lee explains. “I needed something I could ‘play’ about with, and a Van seemed like the ideal thing to do that, as well as put the family in and also use to go away in at the weekends.”

Having embarked upon the restoration of a former BTCC Peugeot 306 at around the same time, Lee also had visions of towing his track car to venues with his new purchase. “It had to be a low mileage one though,” says the canny Yorkshire brickie. “I couldn’t risk taking on a money pit that had been battered and abused most of its life and potentially ploughing just as much money back into it for paint and to make good again.”

Colourful past