There are some influences you don’t recognise until years later. For Ben, his VW Golf Mk3 Gertrude is proof of exactly that.
A car sitting outside the house. A set of wheels you couldn’t name at the time. Magazines lying around. Watching someone older than you pull cars apart, change things, break things, fix them again and somehow turn an ordinary car into something completely their own.
For Ben, cars weren’t something he discovered through Instagram, TikTok or an algorithm.
They were already there.
They became part of his world when he was young, and somewhere along the way that fascination became his own.
Today, you’ll find it sitting outside his house in the shape of a low, red, five-door Volkswagen Golf Mk3.
Her name is Gertrude.
But this isn’t really a story about Gertrude.
It’s about Ben.
And the people, cars and memories that made him the enthusiast he is today.
Ask Mimi what Ben is like when he’s working on cars and one word comes quickly:
Determined.
Although perhaps impatient deserves an honourable mention.
If something isn’t right, Ben doesn’t particularly enjoy the concept of leaving it until tomorrow.
He wants it sorted.
Now.
Mimi remembers him coming home after working a 16-hour shift and still wanting to get on with whatever job was waiting for him on the car.
There simply aren’t enough hours in the day as far as Ben is concerned.
That probably tells you more about him than any list of modifications ever could.
Cars aren’t just something he owns.
He needs to fiddle with them.
Change them.
Improve them.
Work something out.
Then probably decide something else needs changing.
And beneath all of that is something most people who build cars will recognise.
Ben likes seeing someone notice.
The glance across a petrol station.
The nod from another enthusiast.
Someone stopping to look.
A stranger appreciating a detail that most people would walk straight past.
It’s not simply attention for attention’s sake.
It’s the recognition that somebody else understands the time, thought and effort that’s gone into the thing sitting in front of them.
And Ben has put plenty of all three into cars over the years.
Not every one of Ben’s automotive decisions has been a roaring success.
Mimi reckons there is one particular type of car he still has a soft spot for.
The Audi TT.
Unfortunately, one particular TT also provided them with a story that perfectly captures the slightly irrational behaviour that accompanies being obsessed with cars.
They travelled all the way to Glasgow to see it.
Mimi remembers it being dark green.
Ben looked around it.
Although apparently not necessarily at all the things you’d hope somebody might inspect before buying a used car a long way from home.
Mimi particularly remembers him taking an interest in the boot.
The important mechanical bits?
Perhaps slightly less so.
They bought it.
Roughly 12 hours later, the TT was overheating, smoking and no longer particularly interested in being a functioning motor vehicle.
Their ownership lasted about half a day.
Yet somehow, after all that, Mimi still believes Ben’s heart lies with the TT.
That’s cars for you.
The terrible ones often make the best stories.
Although apparently not necessarily at all the things you’d hope somebody might inspect before buying a used car a long way from home.
Mimi particularly remembers him taking an interest in the boot.
The important mechanical bits?
Perhaps slightly less so.
They bought it.
Roughly 12 hours later, the TT was overheating, smoking and no longer particularly interested in being a functioning motor vehicle.
Their ownership lasted about half a day.
Yet somehow, after all that, Mimi still believes Ben’s heart lies with the TT.
That’s cars for you.
The terrible ones often make the best stories.
Ben has owned and worked on plenty of cars.
His social media history alone tells the story of somebody who enjoys the process almost as much as the result.
Projects appear.
Things get dismantled.
Paint gets applied.
Parts change.
Cars disappear.
Something else arrives.
One previous Volkswagen project was proudly described by Ben as receiving:
“The finest Poundland paint job.”
And that little line probably tells you something else about him.
This isn’t cheque-book car building.
There’s humour in it.
There’s DIY.
There’s making the best of what you’ve got and having a go.
Then Gertrude arrived.
And something changed.
Because Gertrude stayed.
We finally have somebody to blame for the name.
Mimi.
Ben apparently believes that giving a car a boy’s name is bad luck.
Mimi, meanwhile, likes old-fashioned names.
So when the red Mk3 needed an identity, she suggested Gertrude.
It stuck.
And, somehow, it suits her.
Gertrude isn’t some outrageous show car designed to stop an entire field in its tracks.
She’s a red five-door Mk3 sitting low over silver five-spoke wheels, retaining the black trim and unmistakable proportions that make her instantly recognisable as a Golf.
That’s part of what makes the car work.
Red bodywork.
Black trim.
Silver wheels.
Low.
Simple.
Gertrude hasn’t been modified to disguise what Volkswagen built.
Ben’s changes emphasise it.
And simple-looking cars are often much harder to get right than people realise.
There’s another reason Gertrude is different.
She’s still there.
Around two years into ownership, Ben is still searching for parts, still thinking about what comes next and still putting time and effort into the same car.
For somebody with a history of changing cars, that’s significant.
Mimi describes Gertrude as being almost like Ben’s first child.
He’s proud that she’s still running.
Proud that she isn’t another project sitting dead and forgotten.
Proud of the work he’s put into her.
And perhaps that’s why Gertrude feels different from some of the cars that came before.
She isn’t just the latest thing.
She’s become part of Ben’s life.
Although that doesn’t mean she’s always made that life easy.
Old modified Volkswagens have a remarkable ability to test the commitment of the people who love them.
Gertrude is no exception.
At one stage, something around the arches and the car’s setup wasn’t right.
The result was tyres.
Lots of tyres.
According to Mimi, they were getting through roughly one tyre a week for around six weeks.
They’d go somewhere.
Something would rub.
Another tyre would be finished.
Another phone call.
Another replacement.
Another hit to the bank account.
Eventually Mimi’s message became fairly straightforward:
Stop changing cars.
Fix the bloody arch.
It’s a small story, but it’s exactly the kind of thing missing from photographs of finished cars.
You see Gertrude sitting neatly over her wheels today.
You don’t see the weeks of frustration that came before it.
That’s the reality of building cars.
Something doesn’t fit.
A bolt won’t move.
The new part is wrong.
Something scrapes.
Something breaks.
You question why you’re doing it.
Then you fix it.
And immediately start looking for the next thing to change.
For all the frustration, sometimes one tiny moment makes the work worthwhile.
One of Mimi’s favourite memories involving Gertrude happened after a trip to hospital.
When they came back out to the car, somebody had left a note.
They loved the Golf.
For most people, that’s probably nothing more than a nice little moment.
For somebody like Ben, it means something.
Because that stranger noticed.
They saw the car.
They appreciated it enough to stop and say something.
And suddenly all those hours spent working after work, all the parts, the frustration and perhaps even a few of those tyres feel slightly more worthwhile.
Someone got it.
To properly understand where Ben’s passion comes from, though, we need to go backwards.
Not because this is somebody else’s story.
But because nobody develops their passion in complete isolation.
For Ben, one of those influences was his older brother, Dougie.
Ben looked up to him enormously.
And when Ben was younger, Dougie was already immersed in the modified-car world.
This was a very different era.
Before reels.
Before TikTok.
Before every build had its own Instagram account.
If you wanted to see the wildest modified cars in Britain, you bought magazines.
And Dougie made it into them.
Open a modified-car magazine from the 2000s and you’re transported into another world.
Big wheels.
Big bodykits.
Big audio installations.
Custom paint.
Smoothed panels.
Show cages. Subtlety wasn’t necessarily the objective. Standing out was.
Open a modified-car magazine from the 2000s and you’re transported into another world.
Big wheels.
Big bodykits.
Big audio installations.
Custom paint.
Smoothed panels.
Show cages.
Subtlety wasn’t necessarily the objective.
Standing out was.
Archive material from that period shows Dougie right in the middle of it.
One of his heavily modified cars appeared in Fast and Modified in 2005, complete with the sort of dramatic styling and huge ICE installation that instantly identifies the era.
But for Volkswagen people, another car matters even more.
Dougie owned a Mk3 Golf VR6.
And it was very far from standard.
Finished in Mulberry and sitting extremely low over white 17-inch Compomotive TH2s, Dougie’s VR6 captured a completely different period of Mk3 modifying from the one Gertrude represents today.
It featured smoothed and altered exterior details, US-influenced styling, Recaros, a show cage and coilovers.
Underneath sat the part that gives those three letters so much meaning to Volkswagen enthusiasts:
VR6.
The engine was running 268 cams and a remap, while a Milltek system with a custom back box provided the soundtrack.
In October 2014, the Golf appeared within the pages of Fast Car.
A physical record of one person’s place in the modified Volkswagen scene.
For the younger Ben, though, Dougie wasn’t simply somebody whose car appeared in a magazine.
He was his brother.
Someone he looked up to.
And that distinction matters.
It would be easy to look at two brothers who both ended up with modified Mk3 Golfs and create a neat story around Ben simply following Dougie.
Real life isn’t that tidy.
Gertrude isn’t a recreation of Dougie’s VR6.
She doesn’t need to be.
The two cars actually demonstrate how much modified Volkswagen culture has changed.
Dougie’s Golf belongs unmistakably to its period.
Mulberry paint.
White Compomotives.
Smoothed details.
Show-car influences.
Gertrude comes from another school entirely.
Red.
Black factory-style trim.
Silver five-spokes.
A stance that gives the car its attitude without trying to reinvent its shape.
Different cars.
Different styles.
Different eras.
But there is a thread running between them.
Mimi can see it too.
Ben talks about Dougie’s Golf. He talks about things he’d like to do to his own car. She sees similarities in the constant stream of cars and ideas.
And she knows how much being recognised for what he’s building means to Ben.
Because he’d seen somebody he looked up to achieve exactly that.
There’s another side to that connection.
And it deserves to be handled quietly.
Dougie isn’t here to see what Ben is doing today.
Mimi talks about the brother Ben doesn’t have at the end of the phone anymore.
The person he could have called and said:
“My car’s doing this.”
Or:
“I’m thinking about doing that.”
Ben was still young when Dougie was building the cars he remembers.
He never really got the opportunity to grow into the enthusiast he is today and share that part of his adult life with the person he’d looked up to.
And perhaps that makes what Ben has achieved for himself matter even more.
Mimi said something towards the end of our conversation that deserves to be left almost exactly as she meant it:
Ben needs to be proud of himself.
Because although influence might help start the journey, Ben is the one who has continued it.
He’s the one doing the work.
He’s the one finding the parts.
He’s the one keeping Gertrude alive.
This is his story now.
Cars may have been there long before, but eventually Ben’s life became about more than whatever was sitting on the driveway.
Mimi came along.
And importantly, she didn’t hate cars.
Far from it.
She loves them too.
That doesn’t mean living with somebody consumed by them has always been easy.
There have been times when Ben has disappeared into working on a car when Mimi would much rather have spent that time with him.
That’s the less glamorous side of passion.
Building cars takes time.
It takes money.
It takes evenings.
It takes weekends.
Occasionally it takes six tyres.
But somewhere along the way, Ben’s strange little world of cars became part of their world.
Mimi describes the family as quirky.
Gertrude apparently didn’t need months to earn her place.
Within days, she just seemed to fit.
Then another person arrived who would change the story again.
Their daughter, Aubrey.
Aubrey is only little.
About a year and a half old.
Yet apparently the groundwork has already begun.
She has her own little set of hammers and screwdrivers.
She has her own keys.
There’s a little car in her bedroom.
Ben talks to her about cars and shows her different ones.
She’s already been along to a couple of meets, with Ben and Mimi understandably keeping her safely away from the less sensible side of car-meet culture.
But perhaps the loveliest detail happens at home.
When Ben comes back from work, Aubrey goes to the window.
She knows he’s coming.
Not because she can necessarily see him.
She recognises the sound of the car.
Dad’s home.
For a child barely old enough to talk properly, cars are already becoming associated with her father.
And Ben appears to have plans.
Forget wheels.
Forget suspension.
Forget whatever part Ben is currently asking Mimi for as a birthday present while she pretends to understand what he’s talking about.
Ben has a much longer-term plan for Gertrude.
He wants Aubrey to go to her prom in the Golf.
More than that, he talks about the day she’s old enough for the two of them to work on Gertrude together.
And apparently he intends for the car to eventually be hers.
Mimi is pretty definite on this point.
Gertrude isn’t going anywhere.
For somebody who has spent years moving through cars, buying projects, selling them and inevitably missing some of them afterwards, perhaps that’s the biggest compliment Ben could ever give one.
Gertrude is a keeper.
And that’s where this story comes full circle.
Years ago, there was a young Ben looking up to his older brother.
Watching the cars.
Absorbing the culture.
Seeing what could be created from something that began life as an ordinary production car.
He couldn’t have known where any of it would lead.
He couldn’t have known about Mimi.
He couldn’t have known about Gertrude.
And he certainly couldn’t have imagined a little girl standing at the window years later, listening for the sound of Dad coming home.
Yet here we are.
Dougie’s cars now exist partly through memories, photographs and old magazine pages — snapshots of a particular moment in British modified-car culture.
Ben’s chapter is happening now.
Not as a copy.
Not as somebody living in another person’s shadow.
As his own.
His own cars.
His own mistakes.
His own ideas.
His own Golf.
His own family.
And one day, perhaps, Aubrey’s chapter begins too.
Maybe she’ll have absolutely no interest in old Volkswagens.
Or maybe those little hammers and screwdrivers are the beginning of something.
Maybe she’ll remember standing at the window waiting for Dad.
Maybe she’ll remember sitting in Gertrude while he told her this was the car she wanted.
Maybe one day Ben really will pull the Golf out of the garage, polish it within an inch of its life and drive his daughter to her prom in the same Mk3 he’s refusing to sell today.
And perhaps years after that, Gertrude will be sitting somewhere with Aubrey holding the keys.
Because that’s the strange thing about cars.
While we’re building them, they feel completely current.
Then suddenly ten years have passed.
Twenty.
Somebody finds an old photograph.
Someone pulls an old magazine from a box.
And you’re transported straight back.
We like to think we’re preserving the cars.
Quite often, they’re preserving us.
The cars change. The styles change. The people get older.
The passion gets passed on.
Want to keep up with Ben, Gertrude and whatever gets changed next?
Instagram: @Mk3.ben
TikTok: @Benji.mk3
Follow along for more of Gertrude, the projects, the problems and life with an old Volkswagen.
For the People. For the Passion.
