Frankie Dejong always wanted to buy a Volkswagen Jetta, so he decided to put a personalized plate on it and came up with JET LAG.
“The JET is for Jetta and the LAG is a shortform for turbo lag because a lot of cars that have turbos have a little bit of lag before they can get into gear and take off, so I decided it would be a fun play on that,” Frankie told me.
The red car was manufactured 33 years ago and had 215,000 kilometres on it when Frankie, who is service technician with Burlington Mazda, bought it privately 12 years ago when he was in high school. It was his first car.
“It wasn’t my dream car, my friends were looking at it and I had never seen it before,” he said. “I liked the boxiness of it. You didn’t really see a lot of them back then.”
He rebuilt the engine with a VR6 and then added the turbocharger because it didn’t come in that particular model.
“It’s a pretty fun, little car,” he said. “It makes about 500 horsepower, that’s what I’m shooting for.”
He said it wasn’t his first idea to put on custom plates when he bought the car. He only did it a year or ago.
“One time I was getting photos taken of my car and I realized how bad the front plate looked,” he said. “So instead of not having something on the front I just decided to buy a Euro plate and make it look a lot better.”
He said you don’t see a lot of people driving these cars because they want to keep them in pristine condition in storage.
“I like driving mine,” he said.
He’s been getting a lot of reaction at stop lights from people wondering what JET LAG means, so he opens his window and gives them the meaning.
He has kept an Ontario plate on the back because it’s required to drive it.
Perry Lefko is the Content Manager of The Car Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected]. Feel free to forward any story suggestions or comments.