Though only really noticable as I was leaving work at 4am. Would have been 3.30 but we'd seen what trouble everyone else was having outside and wanted to delay the inevitable.Everyone's car encased in ice, the thin but hard and smooth kind thats near impossible to scrape and wedges locks like superglue. Was able to help out, eventually, as i'd happily remembered to get my de-icer from the garage yesterday morning - but like a nonce had left it on the passenger seat! (after being distracted by security telling me off for speeding on site... yeah, right..)
However I was the only person with anything more effective than (rapidly cooling) hot water from the club's sink taps.
Luckily the tailgate proved to be the weak point of the VW security (or is it a strong point?) - just a latch rather than a crazy system of cylinders and cables, so a bit of jigging got it to turn right and was able to scramble in through the boot
Engine started perfectly and ran like a darlin', but five minutes of fast idling climbing slowly from 1500-3000 (wedged stoplock, whilst defrosting everyone's screens and locks) made an impressive fogbank of steam from the exhaust but failed to get much heat into the car. Took maybe three or four miles of slow driving in 1st and 2nd (wasteful, but not as bad as idling it) until the crap antifreeze in the screenwash and the weak engine heat internally (combined with mucho wiping with a fluffy thing) cleared the view enough to allow higher speeds and less engine rapage. Luckily there were all of 2 other people on the road in my direction.
Whereupon the temperature, having made it to all of 65'C, started falling again..
back down from 4th to 3rd for the rest of the trip to maintain about 60 degrees. Time to connect the airbox "permanently" (next couple months) to the hot air feed and to hell with the perfomance, i think! Just in case single-point injector icing proves to be a real phenomenon...Roads were sparkly and slippy, but only for braking and yanking the handbrake oddly, and then not much. Any attempts at a full on burnout were met with a brief slide, but almost immediately with a lot of squeal and stalling in 2nd
probably because the grippier tyres melted through to the tarmac a lot faster. Didn't dare try any fast cornering though.Looks like the "coldest winter ever" that some were claiming might really be on it's way - i'm sure I wasn't needing copious amounts of de-icer (finished off a 1/3 full BIG can) until december last year!
