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This
was my first visit to the International Kever Weekend, more commonly
known as ‘Budel’. We had arranged for our trip to Europe to coincide
with two VW shows, the first one being Budel, it was held over the 13th,
14th and 15th of June (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).
The show must be one of the biggest in Europe, situated in the part of
Holland that rubs shoulders with Germany and Belgium, there were
vehicles of all sorts from many countries including a couple of rare
vehicles from Australia, more on these in a later article. We arrived
Friday afternoon after a steady run from our first overnight stop at St-Michiels
near Brugge. The field was already set up with an array of marquees,
trestle tables for the traders and a number of structures that I can
only describe as “VW Art”. This “Art” consisted of a couple of
large VW roundels, the type used on the top of large VW dealers, mounted
high up on scaffold towers. There was also a large scaffold frame
situated near the marquee area with a “VOLKSWAGEN” script mounted on
top, this was also probably off the roof of a VW Dealership. Two other
eye catching structures were, a walkway over the sprint track made to
look like a dragon with a split screen van cab as the head of the
dragon. The van had been painted green and the headlights were modified
to emit an eerie green glow, not the tidiest of sculptures but it made
an effective landmark to locate the walkway, after all you could hardly
miss it. The other structure was a large spider, with a VW Beetle shell
for the body, its legs, made from large diameter pipe, held the Beetle
body high enough to enable the organisers to park the ‘Super Class’
entries of the concours underneath. I dread to think what the ‘Health
& Safety Executive’ would have thought about it if something like
this was put up at a VW show in the UK, anyway, it was an impressive
piece of workmanship, but perhaps not everybody’s cup of tea.
On
Friday evening, the music emanating from the entertainment marquee was
at full strength, almost all of the tracks played were English or sung
in English so at least we could understand them
even if they were a bit loud. The
event got underway on Saturday morning with the arrival of more traders
and show vehicles. We did take a small quantity of Club regalia to help
promote the Club in Europe and had a table along side VW Books, we did
very well considering the limited amount of stock. The ‘English’
greetings cards did surprisingly well and many visitors to our table had
a titter to themselves as they read the saucy script, if you have not
seen these cards we are hoping to show them and the Christmas cards the
club shop stocks in the club shop section of the next issue of Club
News. During
the latter part of Saturday morning it rained heavily and we had to do a
quick pack up to prevent things on our table getting wet, however it
soon cleared up and the Club regalia was out on display again, for the
remainder of the weekend the weather was perfect. At the end of the
afternoon the tour of the local countryside began, a convoy of around
200+ Beetles and other air-cooled VW’s travelled through the local
area, similar to the BVF rundfahrt, many of the locals like to come out
onto the streets and watch the procession, unfortunately for us we
missed it because we were busy with the stand.
Saturday evenings entertainment
was an interesting and varied assortment of events, starting with a
spotlight on several National and International clubs in the
entertainment marquee, then a mixture of live bands alternating with a
popular ‘drive-in movie’, which was displayed on a huge outdoor
screen. What little I could see of the movie looked as if it was a
compilation of video that was taken of the show throughout Saturday, an
interesting concept you don’t see in the UK. A small laser show took
place outside the main marquee shooting patterns of light into the night
sky. The entertainment finished off with quite an impressive firework
display. A very entertaining evening albeit a bit on the loud side. Sunday
saw the start of the sprint finals and the Concours, getting to the
concours field needed good timing, the easiest way to access the field
was to cross the sprint track using the ‘Dragon’ walk way as
described earlier, however, due to safety regulations this was closed
during the sprint. An alternative was to walk to the start of the sprint
track and cross over behind the waiting cars. We managed to slip over
the walkway between sprints. The concours field was full of some of the best VW’s in that
part of Europe, the vehicles varied from the sublime early split window
Beetles to very tidy kit cars and modified Beetles, Type 2 fire engines
to Type 3 saloons. It would have been the envy of any concours manager.
The display vehicles were equally varied, with a number of Type 4’s,
the usual array of Beetles of all ages, and of course the increasingly
popular early Type 2’s (split screen vans). We did spot a nice looking
Beetle pickup with a eye catching two tone paint job and wooden pickup
sides, it looked like an early coach build example that had been
recently restored. There were also several customised vehicles, some
done very tastefully some not so tasteful including one rather silly
settee and coffee table mounted on a
very short Beetle floor pan.
We did spot a rare ‘Razor Edge’ Karmann Ghia body shell which
is based on the Type 3, it looked as if it was part way through a huge
restoration job, we could see where many of the front panels had been
reworked, perhaps we might see it complete next year, unfortunately the
language barrier prevented us from discussing the project with the
owner. Overall, the International Kever Weekend was well worth the
visit, the language barrier wasn’t too much of a problem as many of
the Dutch and Germans speak good English and we could communicate to
some extent in sign language to those that didn’t. We had an enjoyable
weekend, saw loads of interesting VWs and the Club Shop did OK as well.
If you’re seriously mad about all things VW, the Budel weekend is an
ideal event to visit, the closest thing to it in the UK is perhaps the
British VW Festival with a concours that compares with Stanford hall. At
the end of Sunday afternoon we were packed up and on our way towards a
camp site just to the North of Osnabruck to settle in before our next
appointment which was at the Karmann factory. |
