‘ Oddly, the VR6 eventually found its way into the front of a Porsche. Odd, not because the narrow-angle engine wasn’ t suitable for a Porsche, though’
With six cylinders and four-wheel drive, the Golf R32 is a formidable performance car. Especially once turbocharged, the later Mk5 is an even stronger base for modification
‘ Oddly, the VR6 eventually found its way into the front of a Porsche. Odd, not because the narrow-angle engine wasn’ t suitable for a Porsche, though’
Because there’ s only one head, the intake tract for one bank of cylinders is longer than the other. But those cylinders benefit from shorter exhaust ports, so overall air travel is the same for every cylinder. Still, to help manage that air, the longer runners have a cross-sectional circular shape, either for the exhaust or intake, whereas the shorter runners are oval.
To help squeeze all of this into one head, the valve’ s position on each bank is flipped. Exhaust valves are towards the front on one side, and towards the back on the other.
The first production 2.8-litre VR6, the AAA, hit the market in 1991 and was installed in the Volkswagen Corrado and B3 Passat. It produced 176hp at 5800rpm and 245Nm of torque at 4200rpm. It then found its way into VW’ s core car, to make the Mk3 Golf VR6.
The Golf VR6 was slightly down on power compared to the cars Volkswagen had hoped it would challenge, such as the newly-launched E36 BMW 325i – the Bavarian car’ s 24-valve engine made 195hp. But contemporary road tests were always favourable towards the Golf VR6, and rarely did it give anything away to the BMW in terms of speed or enjoyment, despite the 3-Series’ rear-drive platform and its engine having twice the valves.
Shortly after the VR6 was launched, Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft – the Volkswagen AG group, often known as VAG – got a new chairman, Dr Ferdinand Piëch. Piëch, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, was an admirer of innovative engineering and had been instrumental in turning wild projects into success stories. He led the Porsche 909 Bergspyder hillclimb car project and the Le Mans-winning 917 racecar, plus he had spearheaded the creation of the
Densely packaged, the VR6 really does cram six cylinders into a space usually reserved for four
22 The Engine Rebuilder Issue 05