Hot on the heels of last weekend’s Polo Harlekin article, here’s another example of dressing a fairly everyday car in a jazzier colour – or several – in an attempt of making it just a little bit cooler, to enable it to stand out on the street. Volkswagen offered a “Colour Concept” trim level of the GTI, the Golf Cabriolet and the Variant wagon, which meant you got the car in either an interesting colour with matching leather seats – or jet black, if you were the kind of person to order a colour concept car in black. Maybe that’s German black humour.
In any case, and in conjunction to the earlier Weekend Edition posts this time around, there was also a possibility of choosing a very 1990s shade of yellow, with yellow seats. It’s my favorite.


While people dump unconditional love on the first and second generation Volkswagen Golf GTI:s, the third and fourth gen ones are seemingly only cherished by people who are really into Volkswagen Golfs. The jump from the boxy, genre-defining Mk2 Golf to the rounded, heavier, more cynical 1990s Mk3 wasn’t a gentle one, and the GTI version offered you the 2.0-litre “2.slow” engine in either eight-valve or 16-valve guise, with 115 or 150 hp accordingly. Of course, there was the VR6, but that’s another pipe of crack.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for underdog cars such as the 115hp GTI, but with more convincing hot hatches in the 1990s lineup, like the Clio Williams or the Peugeot 306 S16, the Golf’s work wasn’t easy. In any case, the eight-valve 2.0 was the only engine you got in the Mk3 Colour Concept. At least there were Recaro seats and 15-inch “Solitude” wheels by BBS.

In addition to the t(r)opical yellow, the choices were Jazz Blue, Salsa Green, Flash Red and the already-mentioned Diamond Black. All of those colour names are so urban 1990s I had an urge to re-discover my cassette tape collection. The “Blue Line” and “Black Line” versions featured pearl effect paint, while the other colours were non-metallic.

It’s unlikely the Colour Concept cars currently enjoy any such kind of cult status as the Harlekin cars; rather, if you were looking for a tidy GTI or a convertible and it happened to be appointed in one of these schemes, it would be a nice bonus. Also, it’s probably a glitch in the scanner of the original brochure uploader, but having the Volkswagen logo slightly off-center in the grille of that Golf bugs the hell out of me.
[Photos courtesy of Volkswagen, via vwvortex]