There’s a lot of car culture going on here in Wörthersee, Austria, and quite a lot of it is clashing. You really wouldn’t want to live in this pretty village tucked by the lake at the foot of the mountains unless you were pretty keen on Volkswagens, preferably the water-cooled variety, because for the next fortnight around 20,000 owners and their friends will descend on Wörthersee in a flood of Wolfsburg product the like of which you might never have seen before.

How, though, will the attendees of this annual GTI Meet react to the imminent news of the moment? On a large and very white Volkswagen stage opposite the lakeside landing platform, some deep bass notes are beginning to throb, drowning out the thumping Eurotrash shuddering from myriad oversized speakers stuffed into myriad Golfs throughout Wörthersee.

Giant digits count down the seconds on the backstage screen, an explosion of sound erupts, and there, becoming clear as the dry ice subsides, is a blue Scirocco of, broadly, the type that’s about to arrive in dealerships across Europe. But the crucial difference between the car here and the one that goes on UK sale in September is that this is a racing car. It’s one of four built for the Nürburgring – three for the 24-hour race and one as a ‘Ring Taxi’, with a front passenger seat and a pair of onboard cameras, one pointing ahead, the other trained on the passenger.

Out of the driving seat climbs Dr Ulrich Hackenberg, Volkswagen’s R&D chief and one of the drivers for the 24-hour race. Out of the passenger seat emerges Germany’s ‘next top model’, one Gina Lisa, the cue for a photographic flash-frenzy.

Dr Hackenberg is clearly thrilled. ‘I’ll be racing because I want to show the team I’m with the car,’ he’s saying. ‘We want to win our class for 2-litre turbocharged cars with front-wheel drive. The fans expect us to be there. The Nürburgring is the best place to prove Volkswagen is a sporty brand and we shall do this every year.’

Much applause. There are luminaries in the audience, including Porsche dynasty member and former VW chairman Ferdinand PiΫch, just turned 70. And Kris Nissen, head of Volkswagen Motorsport. He’s the man to tap for some background to this Scirocco GT24, as it is to be called.
‘Last year we came eighth overall and won our class with the Golf GTI,’ he says, ‘and we were looking for a new idea. Could we run with the Scirocco? It wouldn’t be on sale but we decided to go for it.

‘We built the cars during January and February [it’s now May] and managed to get the parts early enough from the factory in Portugal. The lights were burning for a long time in the evenings.’

But the GT24 doesn’t look quite like the production car. What, apart from the obvious bulged-out wings, motorsport wheels, lowered suspension and aerodynamic addenda, is non-standard? ‘It has bigger brakes and a limited-slip differential,’ says Nissen, ‘and the engine can run up to 325 PS.’

That’s 321bhp. So does that mean it’s using the bigger turbo from the similarly engined Audi S3 and TTS? ‘No, it’s the standard turbo. About 80 to 85 per cent of the car is standard, so we can show that Volkswagen builds strong and sporty road cars and we can go racing without changing everything.’

Inside, it’s not like the production car at all. The interior is largely stripped out and carbonfibre panelling abounds. Naturally, the gearbox is the double-clutch DSG. Is that standard too? ‘The only change is to the software,’ says Nissen. ‘We allow it to change down earlier so the engine can be right on the rev limit for the best engine braking.’

It looks pretty menacing. A road-going version would be good. Any chance? ‘Yes, it previews the look of the Scirocco R-car,’ says GT24 designer Helmut Schmidt, ‘apart from the wide wings.’ The putative Scirocco R20 TSI (for it will have the four-pot turbo engine) may not quite be the stuff of Wörthersee dreams then, but it will probably do for us.

The Nürburgring 24-hours ran on 24-25 May. All three Scirocco GT24s finished. The leading car, driven by Hans-Joachim Stuck, Jimmy Johansson, Florian Gruber and Thomas Mutsch came 11th overall and won its class. Another, driven by Carlos Sainz among others, came 2nd in class. Dr Hackenberg and his teammates came 32nd overall, out of 219 entries, and 5th in class.
Nothing broke. Job done.