On the back of Mark K's recent success I felt buoyed enough to post some more recent success for the 944 turbo Down Under.
In our local Porsche Club (Porsche Club of New South Wales) we have two formats for competition. Motorkhana which I'm sure most of you are aware of as it's still popular in the UK. (In and out of cones laid out in patterns for those that are unfamiliar) and we have the track sprint events. (ie fastest time within your class gains max points). There are individual championships for those two formats and a combined overall club championship for the best placed in both disciplines over the season.
My friend Sean Buchanan in his 1986 951 road car (with added 3Lt turbo 16v goodness) won every round of the Motorkhana and claimed max points available for that competition. Considering that in this type of competition the cones / Witches hats are very tightly arranged and he seldom gets out of 1st gear plus he has no ABS, PASM, PSM etc and of course a 'laggier' motor compared to modern n/a cars...this is a great achievement. Also to note his car isn't a stripped out CS type car. I believe it weighs somewhere around the 1400kg region and he drives it daily. It has full leather interior, air con, music, harness bar, bigger wheels & tyres etc...ie, heavy.
Sean also won his class in the Sprint title last weekend and this meant he won the overall Club Championships (again) for 2014. Here's a little vision from the 1st warmup session. We were running in the annual PCNSW vs BMWNSW grudgematch so you'll see a few different cars in the pack. The Evo would have been running as an associate of one of the clubs. Most of the other cars in this video are running on full slicks where Sean is on Hankook Z221 R specs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R811_2Zl3gU&feature=em-uploademail
This season I ran my car in a dual driver capacity. That is I drove but so did my builder Paul McKinnon. Paul is a great driver and has tasted success on the track many times previously. We entered 5 Sprint events this season and Paul won every one (breaking all of the track records) and we now have the fastest Porsche that has ever been in the club (which has been running for many decades). To note, we have been up against many GT3's, Cup Cars, 962 copy and even a highly modified 996 RSR with 4Ltr engine, Motorsport ABS, full Sequential tranmission (now with pnumatic paddles) and of course they're all on slicks while we're on Yokohama AO50 R specs.
We had our last round for the season on Saturday. Bright and sunny at Sydney Motorsport Park Grand Prix layout. (Same layout as we'll be on for World Time Attack Challenge in 3 weeks.) We had some new front Aero that we were very keen to try and expected big things from. We still ran on old tyres, one set from October last year and we also ran into a boost leak which kept power down quite a bit. Alarmingly I also came into the pits to find that the rear left tyre was only showing 11psi hot!! Confirming the squidgy rear I was feeling! So we swapped to the year old tyres and Paul went out and beat the benchmark time of 1:38.8 by doing a 1:32.2 which opened a few eyes up! The RSR managed a 1:35.6 and the fastest BMW was a road going E30 M3 that did a 1:40.3 Wolf in sheeps clothing with a Sequential gearbox in that road registered car. Sounded great. Was very surprised that some of the BMW full racecars didn't do better. Not sure what was wrong there but they had several fully caged cars turn up on trailers that promised much. I think their previous best car has done a 1:35 or .36 from memory.
Anyway, we got quite a lot of people coming past our garage to check out this black interloper. Was a fun day except for the glitches. Here's some video from our car. The first one is me with the flat rear tyre. I'm being pretty careful, especially with WTAC around the corner. The second lap is Paul on the old tyres having a bit of fun just trying to find the limits of the car for reference. On the 3rd video he was also compromised by the fact that they're a 30 series aspect ratio where we've set the car up for the 35 a/r tyres. So he was hitting the rev limiter quite a few times through that lap which was done in the heat of the day (ie slower track). The great thing to take away from the weekend was how much the new Aero really felt amazing! The car just sucked down through the notorious Turn 1. Our new minimum speed through that 90o turn which is at the end of the longest straight is now 215kmh and we know we have more in the car. Just a matter of confidence, but there was no point trying to win W.T.A.C. 3 weeks early.
Me: https://vimeo.com/106715445
Paul: https://vimeo.com/106713105
Paul: https://vimeo.com/106724399
I'd also add that video never shows the undulation, bumps, camber, turns and elevation very accurately.
So the 3 competition titles have been taken by two (slightly modified [8|] ) 1986 944 turbos which has never been done before. Next year we will be up against the record times we've set this year so it will be a lot more difficult to back this up. We are considering running slicks next year just to give us a fighting chance. I know the guy with the RSR is attempting to even up the playing field too. Plus there will be a few more interesting cars in the mix so I'm told.
In our local Porsche Club (Porsche Club of New South Wales) we have two formats for competition. Motorkhana which I'm sure most of you are aware of as it's still popular in the UK. (In and out of cones laid out in patterns for those that are unfamiliar) and we have the track sprint events. (ie fastest time within your class gains max points). There are individual championships for those two formats and a combined overall club championship for the best placed in both disciplines over the season.
My friend Sean Buchanan in his 1986 951 road car (with added 3Lt turbo 16v goodness) won every round of the Motorkhana and claimed max points available for that competition. Considering that in this type of competition the cones / Witches hats are very tightly arranged and he seldom gets out of 1st gear plus he has no ABS, PASM, PSM etc and of course a 'laggier' motor compared to modern n/a cars...this is a great achievement. Also to note his car isn't a stripped out CS type car. I believe it weighs somewhere around the 1400kg region and he drives it daily. It has full leather interior, air con, music, harness bar, bigger wheels & tyres etc...ie, heavy.
Sean also won his class in the Sprint title last weekend and this meant he won the overall Club Championships (again) for 2014. Here's a little vision from the 1st warmup session. We were running in the annual PCNSW vs BMWNSW grudgematch so you'll see a few different cars in the pack. The Evo would have been running as an associate of one of the clubs. Most of the other cars in this video are running on full slicks where Sean is on Hankook Z221 R specs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R811_2Zl3gU&feature=em-uploademail
This season I ran my car in a dual driver capacity. That is I drove but so did my builder Paul McKinnon. Paul is a great driver and has tasted success on the track many times previously. We entered 5 Sprint events this season and Paul won every one (breaking all of the track records) and we now have the fastest Porsche that has ever been in the club (which has been running for many decades). To note, we have been up against many GT3's, Cup Cars, 962 copy and even a highly modified 996 RSR with 4Ltr engine, Motorsport ABS, full Sequential tranmission (now with pnumatic paddles) and of course they're all on slicks while we're on Yokohama AO50 R specs.
We had our last round for the season on Saturday. Bright and sunny at Sydney Motorsport Park Grand Prix layout. (Same layout as we'll be on for World Time Attack Challenge in 3 weeks.) We had some new front Aero that we were very keen to try and expected big things from. We still ran on old tyres, one set from October last year and we also ran into a boost leak which kept power down quite a bit. Alarmingly I also came into the pits to find that the rear left tyre was only showing 11psi hot!! Confirming the squidgy rear I was feeling! So we swapped to the year old tyres and Paul went out and beat the benchmark time of 1:38.8 by doing a 1:32.2 which opened a few eyes up! The RSR managed a 1:35.6 and the fastest BMW was a road going E30 M3 that did a 1:40.3 Wolf in sheeps clothing with a Sequential gearbox in that road registered car. Sounded great. Was very surprised that some of the BMW full racecars didn't do better. Not sure what was wrong there but they had several fully caged cars turn up on trailers that promised much. I think their previous best car has done a 1:35 or .36 from memory.
Anyway, we got quite a lot of people coming past our garage to check out this black interloper. Was a fun day except for the glitches. Here's some video from our car. The first one is me with the flat rear tyre. I'm being pretty careful, especially with WTAC around the corner. The second lap is Paul on the old tyres having a bit of fun just trying to find the limits of the car for reference. On the 3rd video he was also compromised by the fact that they're a 30 series aspect ratio where we've set the car up for the 35 a/r tyres. So he was hitting the rev limiter quite a few times through that lap which was done in the heat of the day (ie slower track). The great thing to take away from the weekend was how much the new Aero really felt amazing! The car just sucked down through the notorious Turn 1. Our new minimum speed through that 90o turn which is at the end of the longest straight is now 215kmh and we know we have more in the car. Just a matter of confidence, but there was no point trying to win W.T.A.C. 3 weeks early.
Me: https://vimeo.com/106715445
Paul: https://vimeo.com/106713105
Paul: https://vimeo.com/106724399
I'd also add that video never shows the undulation, bumps, camber, turns and elevation very accurately.
So the 3 competition titles have been taken by two (slightly modified [8|] ) 1986 944 turbos which has never been done before. Next year we will be up against the record times we've set this year so it will be a lot more difficult to back this up. We are considering running slicks next year just to give us a fighting chance. I know the guy with the RSR is attempting to even up the playing field too. Plus there will be a few more interesting cars in the mix so I'm told.
