You’re not supposed to drift a Volkswagen Scirocco. The sexy coupe shares its basic front-wheel drive architecture with the Golf, and it goes without saying that powerslide-friendly rear-wheel drive isn’t available from the factory. A Swedish enthusiast named Kenneth Alm wanted to stand out from his fellow drifters by being the first person in the world to put one sideways, so he spent a few months building the Frankenstein-esque AWD Volkswagen Scirocco of his dreams. Originality is the mother of invention here, not necessity.
Were it written on index cards, the list of modifications made to this Vee-Dub could build a bridge from the Earth to the moon. Alm started by grabbing the drivetrain from an older Audi A4 he used in drift competitions until it became far too worn out to safely hit the track. The Scirocco’s original turbo four was plucked from the engine bay and replaced by a 2.5-liter straight-five which traces its roots back to Audi, according to Auto Evolution. It’s installed longitudinally; that’s not how engineers envisioned the Scirocco’s engine bay, but the layout is crucial to make room for the rest of the drivetrain’s components.
Before going further downstream, Alm made additional upgrades to the engine. Speed Hunters reports he installed a bigger turbo and larger fuel injectors, polished and ported heads, and added a radiator in the trunk. The turbo five now makes anywhere between 800 and 860 horsepower depending on how it’s tuned, which is considerably more than stock. The cavalry gets channeled to all four wheels via a modified quattro all-wheel drive system generously provided by an unsuspecting Audi S4.
The Audi connection doesn’t end there: the front and rear sub-frames both come from an A4. Bigger brakes round out the list of major mechanical modifications. Alm typically fits the car with the cheapest tires he can find because they don’t last very long, so spending a fortune on a set of nice Michelin rubber is useless.
We don’t know how much of the engine’s power gets routed to the rear axle and how much is transferred to the front axle. It doesn’t sound like there’s a drift mode — a trick piece of tech found on cars like the Ford Focus RS — so odds are the rear axle gets more power than the front, allowing it to perform sideways shenanigan all day long.
