Quick, quick, look at this!

[Hilux]

I read all this with great interest.

If you research the `ring, he current ring record is set by a Radical that drove the same length course as Stefan Bellof who has held the record for nearly 30 years. The others are a shorter distance so can only be extrapolated but arent the same! IIRC correctly Derek Bell took a standard 944T around at circa 8:30

The 944 is without doubt a great car. It is however 20 years old. Things have moved on and many ordinary showroom front and rear wheel cars are extremely capable these days as are many many modified older cars. Try a Clio Cup or modified Fiesta or *cough* dare I say a Mk 2 Golf or try catching a well sorted Sierra Cossy and if I may say so you would never even see a well sorted Ginetta 27 V8 without huge power []

A 944 will flatter the driver more than most cars but it doesnt mean it is quicker than all comers in a willy waving contest. It actually doesnt matter as only a small percentage of owners and forum contributors drive on trackdays, the rest are traffic light and tunnel run and garage queens for it doesnt matter provided you like your car. You need to get your cars out there to properly talk about it and get them less than 1000kg to appreciate the dynamics of light weight []

My motto is, and always has been, ....................... "drive what you like - not what you feel you have to" .............................so I do, and I also re-build them before I drive them and if they work [].............then I talk about it from knowledge.

 

[Neil Haughey]

True and with regards to the weight the 944 is relatively heavy for a number of reasons and its only once one has seen one stripped bare you can really appreciate it. Firstly the body shell is very very strong, I don't believe it is that rigid though TBH certainly not in terms of torsional rigidity (in stock form) but the bulkhead areas front and rear, especially around each end of the transmission tunnel are very heavily built. I was up at EMC looking around my body shell when it was bare metal and it is a very impressive basis for a car, the penalty in weight means a very safe car when fitted with a well designed cage and this has been proven in some huge racing accidents here in the UK. On the flip side though parts of the car such as the torque tube and rear torsion bar carrier are stupidly heavy, agricultural engineering at its finest [], but they work. In theory if someone wanted to redesign all that stuff a lot of weight could be saved, it has already been done to some degree such as the Kokeln torsion bar delete and racers drilling the torque tube to make it like a swiss cheese. Even with all that I can't see how a late model 944 could ever get under 1000 Kg though without radical body shell modification and for me this would be criminal as its the body shell as a basic that makes the car so good.