Racing Our Jetta on a Budget – a Little Good Fortune Is Always Welcome

It’s all about curve balls and luck as we get down to good hard racing with our Jetta.

If you’ve been following our series on how we are going racing and winning against current model rivals with a 35-year-old Volkswagen Jetta, you will know more about our mission to take a five grand car and race it at a grand a race. If not, take a read of the first and second episode of our adventures before you carry on here.

Anyway, here’s the short story. Having won the baby Class C title racing a Golf 1 GTi (yes, the original Rabbit in the US) just before lockdown in our local Cape Town, South Africa cheapercars.co.za GTi Challenge, we needed to reaffirm our intentions to see our young charger Giordano Lupini step up to national level racing going forward. All while racing a car we bought for the equivalent of $5,000.00. And we had to win on just $1,000 a race!

Don’t be Fooled – Our Jetta is Winning on A Grand a Race!

Sounds impossible? Don’t be fooled – it’s quite possible! To do that however, we needed to box clever. So, we acquired our good, basically race ready Jetta in March and worked hard to hone it to our needs. And we’d won of the four two races we’d started when we last wrote.

The cheapercars GTi Challenge races exclusively at the Killarney International Raceway outside Cape Town. Yes, that’s Table Mountain in the background of the picture above! GTi Challenge is a well-established, splendidly controlled racing category that caters for naturally aspirated street-based Volkswagens.

Top Class A caters for 200 hp 177 lb.-ft 2400 lbs. 16 or 20-valve cars — mainly Polo 6s. Our Class B is a mixed bag of 160 hp 150 lb. ft 2200 lbs. eight-valve Polos, Jettas and Golfs and Class C is limited to 120 hp 125 lb.-ft 1985 lbs. Golf 1s. Or Citi Golfs as they were latterly known in SA.