Chasing a Racing Championship with a $5K Car
Follow us as we try to win a racing championship with next to no budget and a 1986 Volkswagen Jetta.
Popular belief suggests that motor racing is hellish expensive. But is that really always the case? Is it possible to race, win and chase a championship for eight thousand dollars a season, racing a five-grand car? Indeed, you can. And that’s precisely what we’re aiming to achieve!
In this first of a five-part series through our 2021 season, we introduce you to our campaign to do just that — to take a five-grand car, spend a grand a race and try to lift a title against the odds as we celebrate a unique motor racing milestone.
We Needed to Celebrate a Milestone
Giordano Lupini is a fourth-generation race driver. Not many people can boast that — his great-grandfather Gigi raced in the 1920s, the highlight of his career being a third in the Millie Miglia over-5-litre class driving a Buick in 1929! Gigi moved to Africa in the ‘30s, where he entered a Cooper Maserati and a Mille Miglia Ferrari in local 1950s and ‘60s F1 and endurance races. That’s when Grandpa Mario was an Alfa Romeo and Volvo factory pilot in South African saloon car racing.
Dad Michele was also handy at the wheel, winning South African race and rally championships. Now Giordano’s been racing karts since he was nine, before moving up to cars at fourteen, six years ago. Gio was the 2019 Western Cape GTi Challenge Class C champion in a Golf 1 GTi, a car that they built in SA until 2011. He sat the year out through lockdown 2020, but ’21 is important, so we needed to get back. It is after all 95 years since old Gigi first raced a car way back in ’26.
That 2019 Class C title (above) was bittersweet. Gio was dominant, but two major incidents as a result of axle failures required the car to be replaced when it went over six times after a rear stub axle broke and the wayward wheel tucked under the car. And later in the season, a front hub broke, the brakes failed flat out, and he rolled again after a huge impact. Both times he bounced back with a pole position and race win in an untested car — the morning after the shunt, on the first occasion.