"What.........the hell.............is in these things"?....... I’m standing next to CT & my car & it's about the 10th Porsche driver that has come & asked us this today. We are at Eastern Creek for the final Porsche club Supersprint of the year. It's an over cast day reasonably cool which helps dramatically.
CT & I have just come in from our 2nd timed run & the Porsche guys are gathering around our cars in the pits again. It's been a day of mixed fortunes for all of the VW brigade, Paul with his 2110cc powered L-bug has dropped a tappet nut & has ended the day with only one run, Dieter Hölzl has been clocking up as many laps as possible (sideways) in his 1916cc powered Superbug, CT has just swapped over to his Yokohama race rubber after finding the limits of his street tyres in the very first corner & I've been fortunate enough to not have to touch anything.
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On my first run I reeled off a 2:03.9630 which in layman's terms is puts me around mid pack & CT has done a 2:07.5650 on his street tyres. Dieter & Paul did a 208.1 & 208.0 on their first run & unfortunately that was their best time. I was hoping to have a real good run with Paul but it just hasn't been his year. The plan is now to upgrade the 2110cc with 42x37.5 044 heads & swap the 45mm Dells for 48's. Should be a screamer!.
Quite a bizarre thing happened for the second run, whilst in the line up to get out onto the track, other Porsche drivers were getting out of their cars & congratulating me for my time on the first run!! Pretty bizarre! & just as I was about to get onto the track, I heard one Porsche driver yell from the pits, "C'mon Rizzo, I want to see a sub 2:03 from u"!, Porsche drivers egging on a VW driver? Wonders never cease. With the new close ratio box built for me by Richard Hölzl, I can now pull a shade over 6000rpm in top gear just before the sweeper, I actually have to brake now whereas last year I didn't, the purr of the 4 wheel cross drilled brakes is reassuring, drops back to 5000rpm through the sweeper, all I could think is that if she lets go now it'll be a mess, thoughts went back to my father Joe when he handed me the keys to my VW 11 years ago, his advice was simple, "If the rear lets go, don't take your foot off the accelerator" I put my foot back into it & pull 5500rpm out of the sweeper, head towards turn 2, ignore the 100m sign for the corner, wait until about 50m, hit the brakes & if I wasn't in the harness me head would hit the windscreen, turn into turn 2, the rear steps out , my foot still firmly trying to mash the accelerator into the floor as the car smoothly slides back around & I'm into turn 3. Driving on the edge nearly paid off with my 3 laps consisting of a 2:03.6, 2:03.1 & 2:03.3, very close to 2:02 but not quite! CT meanwhile had overtaken a Boxster (as u do) on an oil-covered part of the track & had been black-flagged! So his day had just been getting better & better.
Because of the oil spill from a Porsche, the number of time runs we had was dramatically reduced & with a thunder & lightning storm just over the hill, we were quite eager to get in a final run. Finally CT had some good luck for the day & reeled off a 2:03.2510! 1 tenth of a second behind me!!! Fantastic! Wait until the Porsche guys get the results!
That put us 26th & 27th out of 55 cars for the day, our best result yet & to top it off we topped our class as well. In all fairness, CT probably would have got a faster time as he was only really warming up when the day was over so I consider myself lucky that I was able push my street tyres to the times that I got. CT also had a faulty distributor that didn't really allow him to cleanly rev the car out which probably equates to lack of time as well.
Jak Rizzo VW Superbug 02:03.156
CT Hansen VW Oval 02:03.251
Steve Mawson Audi S3 02:03.959
Andrew Ochudzawa Audi TT 02:04.890
Andrew Powe Nissan GTR 02:06.516
Paul Loiacono VW L-Bug 02:08.096
Dieter Hölzl VW Superbug 02:08.158
Chris Easton Skyline HR31 02:11.939
Changes for next year will be swapping my 40x35.5 040 heads for some 42x37.5 044 heads, CT will have my heads & get rid of the 10.5:1 044s that he has now, that, with a new distributor will eliminate the need for Avgas & stop the detonation & heat problems. He's also going to change his 1.58 inch header with a 1.5 inch one & apart from us both getting the wheel alignments & suspension setups properly setup (we are learning as we go) there’s not much else to do. A big thanks for our success this year goes to Richard Holzl from V-Force who built the gearbox for CT & I, supplied me with my rear brakes, my billet cam, chromoly rods, all the head work plus a million other parts that I couldn't list here. He also has on occasion travelled all the way to Avalon & the Central Coast to help CT & I get things done overnight, just to keep us on the track. Without his support & advice we wouldn't be having as much fun as we are. Richard can be contacted for info on our engine brake & suspension setups, as there are no 'secrets' to what we are using. The more the merrier we say!
All things considered it's been a pretty good year, I was able to take 2 seconds off Oran Park short circuit, 4 seconds off Oran Park long circuit, 2 seconds off Wakefield Park & 4.5 seconds off Eastern Creek & CT did similar.
Hopefully we'll have a couple more street VW's join us for next year as well in the Porsche club
Until then stay cool, Jak Rizzo