Racing Up a Step: Shifting into Sixth Gear in Polo Cup
Inside Story: Follow Our Team into a Breeding Ground of Champions
Regular readers will be familiar with our efforts to win races in a five grand Jetta at a thousand dollars a race last season. It was a success succeeded. We won races, reset the record books and out good old ’86 Jetta TDI handed it to the latest VW Polos in GTi Challenge. We came in under budget and even flipped the old Jetta for a little profit.
But Wait! We Had Hidden Motives…
It was fun. The whole point of the exercise was to get our driver Giordano Lupini back into the swing of things, impress out new sponsors and move on to bigger things…
The South African Volkswagen Polo Cup is in its 26th season this year. Its champions over the years include Audi factory driver Kelvin van der Linde, who quite literally fought to the death in DTM German Touring Cars, his DTM winning BMW brother Sheldon and reigning Lamborghini GT America champion Jordan Pepper. In short, Polo Cup is the breeding ground of champions. Our plan all along, was to move up to Polo Cup, as soon as possible.
Well, that move up began already last season. Happy with our winning progress in a regional championship, our partners saw merit in stepping up to the national Polo Cup. So parallel with wrapping up our Jetta effort late last year, we acquired a Polo Cup racer and embarked on a two-race program in preparation for a full tilt at the 2022 Polo Cup season. Our regular Cape Town speed shop Nian du Tout Racing prepared the car, Master Panelbeaters cleaned it up and sprayed it black and we had the Bullion IT Polo looking spectacular.
Lockdown Wreaked Havoc. The Racing Wasn’t Much Better!
Then the next wave of lockdown closed racing down, and instead of starting as planned at our home track at Killarney, where our practice pace had been promising, our debut race was shifted up to Red Star Racing in a dusty mining town called Delmas, 50 miles west of Johannesburg. We knew it would be tough, but we decided, what the hell, let’s just go anyway. So, we loaded up and trekked the thousand miles north, to what we were expecting to be a weekend of hell. Man, did it deliver!
Our driver was beyond excited, but he also knew the challenges at hand. “It’s been a long road to Polo Cup for us,” Gio explained. “We’re starting fresh with a new car prepared by a new Cape team on an upcountry racetrack that we have never seen before! “But we’ve been quietly preparing our Bullion IT Polo and look forward to a learning weekend at Red Star. “What’s life without a challenge?”
The weekend proved as daunting as expected: “Wow, that was a baptism of fire!” Giordano admitted. “Red Star is tight, twisty and demanding — I even found myself lost with all those corners that look the same as the next one in my first session on Friday, “But it came to me as we progressed, and we had decent pace in practice. “Then we made a few rookie mistakes in set-up, strategy, and approach on the new rubber in qualifying. “Alas, I ended up at the back!