Excerpts from the Beetle CUP test days for racing drivers and journalists in the USA.
The Beetle Cup was a great success in Europe, was then introduced to US as well
USA journalist report:
The 1998 New Beetle was in production at the time. It soon became clear that the car wasn't going to sell itself, so Volkswagen set about building a racing car to attract more attention and make the New Beetle look fast and cool. After a year of treasure hunting in the bottomless VAG parts crate, the development of the Volkswagen New Beetle Cup was completed in 1999. The Cup has been contested in two official series, the 99 Cup Series and the 00 Millennium Cup. The New Beetle was sometimes even driven together with the Lupo Cup.
There isn't much reliable information online about the New Beetle Cup, so a lot of the specs are speculation and conjecture. Although the New Beetle Cup featured a stripped down interior, it weighed almost as much as the road car due to all the safety equipment and a larger engine. The engine wasn't your base model inline 4, but the 2.8-litre VR6 from the Golf Mk3. The VR6 wasn't very powerful on its own, so the engine had some simple modifications including new cams and adjusted valve timing. All that goodness is delivered to the front wheels with a Quaife LSD. The '99 Cup season was sponsored by Pirelli, so all cars with a set of P-Zeros are grounded.
I took some liberties and preferred to put KUNOS Semis on it because bashing a 200hp car around with infinite grip wasn't a very appealing drive.
After everyone involved had their fun beetle race, some Volkswagen board members thought it would be a piece of cake to cram the interior parts of the future MK4 R32 into a New Beetle. So a bunch of VAG engineers got drunk on the cheapest Lager Beer ( that's really a Volkswagen story) and got to work. The finished product was the $80,000 New Beetle RSi. Only 250 examples were ever built. So even if you were rich enough to buy one of these new, the last thing on your mind would be putting it on the track.