Also in my garage: classic cars and air-cooled curios

By Charlie Calderwood

| 14 Feb 2023

Classic & Sports Car – Also in my garage: classic cars and air-cooled curios

The instinct not to throw away cool things is in us all, but few of us have the space and money to hold on to all of the interesting stuff we come across over decades of work.

But that is just what Mark Reynolds has done.

Founder of air-cooled Volkswagen parts supplier Just Kampers, Mark has been part of the scene for more than two decades, has owned 200 or so VWs and Porsches in that time, and has all the contacts you’d imagine that brings.

Mark Reynolds’ rare Dannenhauer & Stauss Sportkabriolett pictured during the restoration process

On a stand in his garage, in front of the 1951 Dannenhauer & Stauss Sportkabriolett featured recently in Classic & Sports Car, is what looks like any old VW flat-four.

“I had a friend who went to the Okrasa bankruptcy sale and bought a big pile of wheels that was sold simply as it was,” he explains. “This engine was buried beneath it.”

Mark bought the unit, which turned out to be one of the first ever by famed Volkswagen tuner Okrasa.

Shelves were made from a bent chassis that came with Mark’s D&S

“It’s obvious it’s a prototype from the fairly rough welding where they have cut into it to remove the blades from the cooling fan,” continues Mark.

“They built it for speed, not longevity, and by taking the blades off the fan, the engine could spin faster.”

Being head of a VW parts firm, Mark didn’t just keep the engine as a curio.

It was taken apart, and Just Kampers has since built a replica that now powers Mark’s own Beetle, which he entered on the Mille Miglia in 2017: “When we looked at the ported and polished heads, we saw things that drag racers in the VW scene weren’t doing until the 1980s.”

Mark has been part of the air-cooled Volkswagen scene for more than two decades

The Okrasa unit isn’t the only engine in his garage.

There’s a stock Porsche 356 motor – the matching-numbers original from his Rod Emory-powered 356 Speedster – and more oddities on a bench in the corner.

“They were teaching aids used in German technical colleges in the 1950s,” says Mark, winding the handle welded to an engine’s crank, with a regular ‘click’ still audible from the spark plugs.

“It’s got a magneto, so it all still works. They are just very cool.”

The D&S is built on Porsche 356 running gear

Mark also has a sectioned gearbox and exhaust, all from a mid-1950s VW.

It’s only recently that the arch-enthusiast has amalgamated the collection of VW-related parts in his garage, a case in point being the bright green pair of Type 2 ‘barn doors’, hand-painted by an Aboriginal artist in Australia, that dominate the vertical space of the room.

“Like a lot of my stuff, they had been in a corner of the Just Kampers workshop for a long time,” says Mark.

“I wanted to mount them on the wall, but it’s only when you raise them up to a flat surface that you realise how convex they are.”

Mark has an original English handbook for the D&S

The doors rest on a giant easel, covering the air-conditioning unit on the wall.

Mark used to own the entire van, which was painted all over, but it was damaged in a front-end accident.

Holding on to bits of cars that are largely useless is a theme here, but Mark can’t bring himself to throw things away: there’s a shelving unit made from the bent chassis that originally came with his D&S.

Rods put through existing holes hold up shelves that display photos of the car at various points in its life and restoration.

Gisela Stauss gave Mark an original D&S workshop sign (left); it now hangs over the restored car in his garage

Mark also paid a visit to the D&S workshop when he was restoring the car, and was gifted the company’s ‘Parkplatz’ car-park sign by founder Kurt Stauss’ daughter, Gisela.

The sign hangs over where his D&S, built to the spec Kurt Stauss had always wanted but never achieved, now stands.

Hundreds of miles from Stuttgart, perhaps, but it seems an appropriate place for it.

Enjoy more of the world’s best classic car content every month when you subscribe to C&SC – get our latest deals here

Porsche Speedsters: California dream machines

Volkswagen Beetle: Wolfsburg’s miracle car