The Jagerbug has been built by a dedicated bunch of members from the Fl4tlanders VW Club, a Volkswagen club based in Lincoln, England.

The initial idea for building a race car came about one sunny afternoon in July 2007. The club were attending Bug Jam, the biggest VW festival of the calendar in the UK. It was whilst watching the drag racing that we were discussing an old Beetle racecar by the name of "Cashback". Cashback was passed from club to club back in the early 00's It had become available but was in a bad way after a roof of a garage had collapsed onto the car.

Alex came up with the idea of building our own club built dragcar. Why not? How hard could it be? All we needed was a suitable donor vehicle and plenty of hours of hard graft to realise our dream.....

Paul Bratley, another club member had the perfect donar vehicle sat in his garden. A 1972 Beetle that had been sat for a while, awaiting restoration. Unfortunately, during it's time spent patiently sat in the garden, a large tree had been blown onto its roof during a storm. This had badly damaged the roof and with the Bug being a 70's model rather than a more desirable earlier one, it seemed it would never be restored back to stock so gave us the perfect opportunity to chop the roof at the same time!

Lot's of discussion on the club forum about the logistics of the project later and we were ready to start. November 2007 saw the first activity with the Bug being pulled to bits to assess how much work would be needed. The answer was lots! Check out the pictures of the Jägerbug build to see just how much of the original car was cut away before the Jägerbug was built from mainly new panels throughout.

Right from day one the project needed to be self funding. There was nobody bank rolling the project and at that stage not a single sponsor in sight. Many, many hours of letter / email writing ensued,  followed by countless phonecalls to numerous VW parts suppliers. Eventually we convinced enough people that we were not crazy and that we would see the project through to the very end.

Even before the first panel was welded into the car we launched a range of Jägerbug stickers and t-shirts. The money raised by selling a small number of these allowed us to purchase panels from VW Heritage at a greatly reduced price. Other parts / panels began to be donated and before long, the Jägerbug was beginning to become a possibility not just a dream.

Wednesday evening became "Jägerbug Night" and a number of members got together each week armed with grinders, spanners and doughnuts to tackle the massive project. Week by week the car was stripped back to the absolute bare minimum, before new panels were welded back in. At this point Ultra VW magazine got on board and really helped by publishing updates on the Jägerbug's progress.