Shoestring Jetta: Dispelling Motor Racing Myths One Win at a Time
We’d Made Great Progress to Win. Them More So!
Qualifying started well enough as Gio was quickly on top of the time sheet with the quickest ever official Class B lap. But Eden Thompson left it to late in the session to put in his flyer and steal the pole by a tenth of a second. We had indeed made great progress, but right on cue, our principal opposition had reacted brilliantly and used their fresh rubber to best effect too. Eden had found a full second back to leapfrog our best efforts since the previous round!
Then Giordano fluffed the start and had to fight back from fifth out of Turn 1. “I got back to second easily enough,” Our man confessed. “But once I’d caught him, Eden had an answer for whatever I threw at him. “He held me off to take the heat by seven-hundredths of a second!” There was some consolation though — Giordano broke his own lap record again to score a couple of bonus points. So we were on pole for race 2 and carrying 25 pounds less ballast, too. Was a win on the cards?
Gio made a decent start off the pole but had to fight back past a feisty Jaco Lambert’s Golf, which made an even better start off the second row. “From there, I managed to get away and controlled the pace to bring it home for my first official Class B overall win off with another new lap record!” Giordano considers twice beating all the Class B cars in his C Golf 1 GTi back in 2019 as ‘unofficial Class B wins.’
All Shook Up!
So, two races into our quest, we’d already met two of our three budget racing objectives. We had raced twice and still had change in the racing account from our grand-a-race budget. And we’d not just won two of our four races, and our second race day overall, but we’d been on pole position three times out of four, and twice already broken our class lap record. We were clearly ahead of our game.
Best of all however, is that we had shaken up the Class B applecart. Eden’s pace was quicker than ever — he and his team responded brilliantly to our challenge, which will make our battle one of the talking points for the rest of the season. But our own team had also enabled us to take the fight to the GTi champion and win, and we were starting to close in on the top of the Class B title points table. And that made for great excitement in the lead up to the next round.
Come back in a month or so to find out what happened next. As we continue in our quest to win a serious championship racing our $5,000 racing Jetta at a budget of just a grand a month!
Images: Abri de Bruyn
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