Chasing a Racing Championship with a $5K Car

Mountain to Climb

Getting back to our story, we knew we had a bit of a mountain to climb. The guy we bought our car from sold it because he is now racing a new Polo 6. It has the same long-block 2-litre 8-valve and 5-speed ‘box we run, but everything is new, and they never spared too much expense in building it. It’s wieldy, stiffer and more modern. But it’s also heavy and they are struggling to meet the minimum weight on the scales…

With the basis in place, we went to visit Nian du Toit at his new race shop on the Killarney back straight about running our car. Nian won class A in 2019, our new car won the B title that year and Gio was the ‘19 C champion. And we were confident that this combination may very well prove formidable.

Best of all, Eden was happy to sell us his old car straight off a cursory test on the series dyno. Which showed great numbers. We stripped off all the old decals while we waited for a gap to do an exploratory secret test. That went very well too (above). So we were free to start preparing for the first race early in April. The car went to off our panel partners, Master Panel Beaters for a little well-earned TLC straight off the test, we designed a new look, made up the stickers and applied them.

Proper Little Affair

With new sponsors, a pretty, shiny ’new’ car and a great cause to boast, we arranged a launch event the Saturday two weeks before Race 1 and rolled out our plans to our excited sponsors, family, friends and local media at what proved to be a proper little affair.

And then we went testing. The first session was brilliant. G rapidly blew the cobwebs away and we were right on the quick pace straight out the box. We discussed the car and Giordano, his race engineer Chase Herholdt and Nian decided on some changes and we went back a few days later to test them. Gio reported that the chassis changes seemed to work very well, but the pace was just not there. His shift points were all late and the five grand Jetta felt sluggish. What now?