Volkswagen Golf GTI. The first scratch. The Management Fleet

 A shame-filled admission as our Management Fleet Volkswagen Golf GTI already boasts a scuffed alloy.

“Well that didn’t take long”

It’s a fair comment. Not two months ago, I accidentally scuffed an alloy on one of our temporary loans in a ridiculously tight car park. Mocking complete, life at crankandpiston.com moved on only for almost the exact same situation to repeat itself this month. Consequently, our brand new Volkswagen Golf GTI long termer now boasts a dirty great scratch on the passenger-side alloy courtesy of yours truly.

It’s a sizeable blot on my copybook, one I was keen to remove ASAP by contacting the Volkswagen Middle East PR team and enquiring about possible repair solutions. A few ‘oh James!’s later, a plan was in place whereby the GTI would be dropped at one of VW’s regional service centres, repairs would be undertaken, appropriate pictures taken, another Management Fleet report would be in the bag, and all trace of my carelessness would be gone forever. Simple.

Or so I thought. Such is the influx of traffic at the Al Nabooda group’s service facilities in Dubai that despite multiple messages from the VW PR team and pleading phone calls from myself, none of this came to pass. Not only could the Al Nabooda group not guarantee with any certainty when a service slot would be available, it could not even confirm whether the work would be done the same day. While the prospect of camping out for two days in the Al Nabooda waiting room – camera in-hand – demonstrated ably crankandpiston’s dedication, it would rather knacker the week’s productivity too. The work by Al Nabooda would no doubt be spotless when complete though, hopefully we’ll have some good news on that in the months that follow.

I also mentioned last month that the entire crankandpiston team had been looking forward to driving the new GTI. Such has proved the case. Most days are punctuated for calls to grab the Golf keys ‘for an hour or two’ at lunchtime, while battery, tyre and engine management issues among the team’s usual fleet has established the Golf as the most popular loaner. Tempting as it is to secrete the GTI away in an underground parking lot, I can’t imagine it would go down well with the rest of the team.

I’d probably scratch another alloy in the process anyway.

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