Driving through the Austrian Alps, you’ll discover that even some of the tiniest villages have massive stone statues in the middle of town. They might be town founders, or famous residents. In Reifnitz, on the shore of Lake Woerthersee near the Slovenian border, that stone statue is a 55-inch-tall, full-scale replica of a Volkswagen Golf. Once a year, that Golf gets a lot of company.
Since 1981, the town has hosted the Woerthersee Treffen, an annual meeting of car enthusiasts that draws some 200,000 people to the tiny town over the four days of Germany and Austria’s Ascension day, also known as Father’s Day, long weekend.
In photos: The strange cars and characters of a massive Golf GTI festival
“Here on Father’s Day, the tradition is for people to go and drink in the forest – it’s always on a Thursday, so Friday’s a writeoff and they have Saturday and Sunday to recover,” says Thomas Tetzlaff, Volkswagen Canada spokesman. “You don’t have to be a father, you don’t even have to be a man. But 35 years ago, a handful of GTI owners decided instead to bring their cars and meet at Lake Woerthersee – and every year it just kept growing.”
I’m here for the 35th anniversary of the Treffen – and 40th of the Golf GTI – with colleague Matt St. Pierre, of Montreal.
We head to a waiting Golf R SportsWagen. The coveted GTI Clubsports have already been spoken for, but we’re promised one for the way back. As we leave the Autobahn – where St. Pierre briefly got the R up to 255 km/h despite slower drivers clogging the free-flowing lane – and cross into Austria, Teztlaff says that this year, VW has a more modest presence at Woerthersee.
Last year, there were pavilions for Audi, SEAT and Skoda – all owned by Volkswagen Auto Group. There was also a test track. This year, it is only a setting up a Golf GTI pavilion – featuring every generation of GTI and the 306-horsepower Clubsport S that set a record for the fastest lap by a front-wheel drive production car at the Nuerburgring Nordschleife – but it’s smaller than in recent years.
The official theme of the festival is “back to the roots.”
Could this shift have anything to do with Dieselgate, the emissions-test cheating scandal that cost Volkswagen $16.2-billion (U.S.)?
It was the town’s new mayor who decided to declutter the festival, Tetzlaff says. Also gone are a lot of the vendors and a Jaegermeister tent. The idea is to bring the focus back to its GTI-centred origins.
From Munich, it’s about a three-hour drive straight to Woerthersee, but we force the R’s navi to let us take winding back roads through the mountains to the tiny village of Kals am Grossglockner. There’s still snow in parts.
The next morning, before heading across to Reifnitz in a boat, we take out a few GTIs for a quick drive through Poertschach am Woerthersee, the nearby resort town. We get a first- and a second-generation GTI that Volkswagen has brought from its museum.
And then we take out the GTI Clubsport. It has 261 horsepower, but an overboost function gives it 286. Even just driving around town and a nearby highway – where the photo-radar patrolled speed limit is 100 km/h – the Clubsport feels “like it’s on cocaine,” St. Pierre says. Like yesterday’s SportsWagen, it won’t be sold in North America.
All three cars turn heads as we head through town, where there are lines outside the car washes.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think the event was here – at 9 a.m., there are already gleaming cars lined up along the roads – and there will be cars parading in a loop through town and on the hillside roads around the lake for the next four days. But that’s just spillover from the main event.
Wörthersee Treffen
The first thing you notice as you approach Reifnitz by boat is the booming techno. When you get closer, you see the cars. They’re lined up for kilometres, all heading into town at a crawl.
The loop through the village is maybe 600 metres. The cars – mostly Golfs, but also Polos, Sciroccos and then Audis, BMWs, Porsches and others (somebody tells me they spotted a GM truck) – drive it for hours at a near standstill.
Onlookers walk on the street around them and snap smartphone pictures of the cars.
“It’s a hobby – we just come here and drive and see tuner cars,” says Ingo Reiter, 23, who brought his 2006 GTI from Salzburg. “And then we will park and maybe drink some beer.”
Even with the official move to make it more family-focused, there’s still beer – and the revelling will step up in the evening. Volkswagen is running a party boat – with flashing lights and still more techno, even in the afternoon – ferrying people to and from the main town.
But what’s most noticeable, despite the crowds and constant techno, is how calm it all is.
Despite all the cars, nobody is nudging the car ahead to hurry up. Nobody is honking at pedestrians in the way. Except for a bit of applause in the stands at the lot where GTIs do burnouts, nobody is cheering, screaming or yelling.
“We’re just here to see the GTIs,” says Fabio Zauchi, 22, who drove all night from Switzerland in his 2006 Golf GTI 30th-anniversary edition to be here. “I love them because they are fast and they look good.”
Mostly, people are quietly, but enthusiastically, appreciating the cars. The bulk are classics –some carefully restored, some still needing work. There are also ordinary GTIs along with souped-up versions.
“I don’t have a car, but I’d like a Golf 2,” says Philip Brunner, 24. “The old cars are better – back to the roots.”
The bulk of the licence plates are from Austria and Germany, but I spot plates from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and England.
Cars that aren’t driving just sit on the grass – often with their owners nowhere in sight. Instead of guarding their cars from fingerprints, many owners are off looking at other cars, or lying in the sun with a beer. “I’ve had 60 cars in 15 years – 60 not 16,” says Andrea Nedelkovits, 40, sitting with her dog a few cars down from her 34-year-old Golf. “I keep going back to Volkswagen and to the Golf.”
Treffen means meeting in German. And that’s the best way to describe it. It’s not a rally or a car show.
“I’ve been here for more than 20 years,” says Andreas Amort, 50. “It’s a kind of lifestyle – we make the cars new and then we come here and meet.”
Amort, here with his 1983 GTI, appreciates the move to bring the focus back to Volkswagen’s Golf.
“This year, they’re trying to make it more like it used to be – I think that’s good,” he says, adding that he has no interest in getting a GTI Clubsport – or any newer GTI. “With the new cars, I can’t fix anything myself – with this car, I can fix everything.”
The writer was a guest of the auto maker. Content was not subject to approval.
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