Many cars of
this time frame may not have a vacuum advance.
I know my Fiat Spider doesn't( I think the VW's did though ).
I've
never had a spider but I had other Fiats and MANY VWs and
they all had VA. One of the common mods to the VW was to change the
stock VA distributor to a mechanical advance only distributor with a
faster advance curve. I used that in a couple of VWs but they weren't
original.
There was at least one model each of Porsche and VW that had them as stock
original equipment. Maybe some mid 1950s VW Bus? (All of the 60s and
newer VW had VA) Six months ago, I got rid of 3 used mechanical advance
distributors and a Mallory mechanical distributor for VW (and a couple of
boxes of type 3 fool injection stuff).
Reduction of storage space sucks.