Bryan E. Miller
- Oct 1, 2020
- 3 min read

MK4 VW VR6

Updated: Oct 1, 2020

Owner: Eric Baun

Vehicle: 2000 Volkswagen Golf VR6

Engine: 12v VR6 swap

Eric Baun bought the Golf right before his senior year of high school. It started life as a TDI, which was great at the time with the amount of driving Eric was doing. Not soon after he started to get the itch to start playing with it. Started with wheels & coils, the usual. Once Eric could afford it, the engine mods started. FMIC, Exhaust, Intake, tune. 12 years ago, once it was paid off and retired as the daily, he went down the rabbit hole and started shaving stuff here and there on the body and the engine bay.

Fast forward a year or so to H2Oi in Ocean City, Maryland. While on the way to a meet the sky opened up and being at sea level the streets flooded instantly. Didn’t even make it a block before hydolocking the motor. Not knowing any better at the time, Eric forcefully started the motor and bent a connecting rod. This, as you would imagine did not make the car happy. Luckily, Eric was able to limp the car home the 550+ miles home on 3 cylinders (30 psi of boost helped). Once it was home he knew the TDI motor would never start again. As luck would have it, a friend was just beginning to part out his MKIV VR6. Eric was able to get the motor and most of the related parts for the swap from him. Eric did the motor swap in the driveway over the next few weeks. Now that the car had double the stock TDI hp, it was obviously much more fun to drive.

The following year Eric made it out to multiple larger shows and took home some hardware. It was in that same year that Eric did his first track day. Once he drank that Kool Aid, he never looked back. Over the past years, the focus has been developing the car while at the same time, developing as a driver. Eric's current focus is taking what he's learned over the past seasons as part of the Junk Players Special team in the ChampCar and AER endurance series to better set up the car. Mostly, its runs at open track days or HDPE’s. Playing with idea focusing the build towards wheel to wheel with GRIDLIFE Touring Cup or NASA. After all, are builds really ever done...