The Legacy Goes On
I wasn't in Żerków this year. Kozlarek was. His photographs show good weather and cars rolling in one by one. Not much seems to have changed.
In Żerków, that is the best possible news.
Most car events get exactly one life. The Wolfsgruppe VAG Event had a great one. Ten editions on the grass of a resort town deep in the Polish countryside, mentioned in the same breath as the big Western shows. When Przemo and Kaśka closed the gate after the tenth, nothing about it was bitter. Some things simply feel finished to the people who made them. The scene kept the memory warm for a decade. What almost never happens came next. The gate opened again, and by every account it still feels like the same place, the same family weekend it always was.
In 2024, Wolfsgruppe agreed to come back exactly once, for the fifteenth anniversary of a magazine called VOLXZONE, run by a man the Polish VAG scene knows simply as Bielin.
Patryk Bieliński has been doing this since before doing this was a job. A crew called volXplayers in 2007. Car features on a forum portal in 2008. In 2009, the first Polish e-zine about modified cars, a bimonthly PDF, back when that was a radical act of publishing. A blog. And in 2017 he finally made the thing he wanted all along. Print, in a limited run, for people who keep magazines on shelves instead of in tabs. If the trajectory sounds familiar, it should. Slow media people recognize each other.
Driving home from that 2024 edition, Patryk had one sentence from Przemo and Kaśka still in his ears. If the event returns in 2025, it returns only under the VOLXZONE banner. He has written, with an honesty you rarely get from organizers, that the weight of it initially overwhelmed him. The people and the place. Somewhere on that drive a Snoop Dogg track resurfaced from his playlist. We All We Got. It became the slogan of the first VolxZone Event, and quietly, its constitution.
Patryk understood something about inheritance. You don't preserve a legend by repeating it. You preserve it by editing it. The VolxZone Event selects cars through an application form the way an editor selects stories. Condition and history, style and fit. The rulebook reads like a manifesto disguised as terms and conditions. No exhaust shooting, no launch-control theatre. Ten kilometres per hour on the grounds. Everything that makes an event go viral is banned. Everything that makes people come back for twenty years is kept. Patryk calls Żerków "much less of a show, much more of a family meeting," and the regulations repeat that sentence in smaller print.
This year's edition, the second, ran from the third to the fifth of July, with the quiet before-party on Thursday at the MCT hotel, the same resort grounds, the same gate. The poster premiered on Saturday at one o'clock and says it plainly. The Legacy Goes On. Put the two slogans in sequence, We All We Got, then The Legacy Goes On, and you have the entire story of this succession in eight words.
Saturday afternoon carried the real payload. VOLXZONE #9 premiered on the grass, sold a few metres from the cars it will outlive. Next to it lay the first Polish-distributed issue of Performance VW, the British monthly that has shaped this scene since 1996. VOLXZONE is now its official distributor here. A car event where the merchandise is magazines. I like it when everything lines up.
There was one search running underneath this edition. The organizers had put out a call months earlier. They were looking for a Golf Mk1 GTI. Fifty years of GTI fall in 2026, and while Volkswagen celebrates with a 325-horsepower Edition 50 and press events in warm halls, Żerków wanted the original thing, standing in grass.
Every scene needs a place where it can simply be itself, with nothing to prove and no one to convince. For the VAG world, one of those places is a field in Żerków, one weekend a year. The kindest wish anyone can offer it is more of the same. Another July, then another, for as long as people want to keep coming.
