In late 2011 I decided I wanted to race. I had spent the whole of 2011 helping a friend of mine who raced in the SMRC Classic Sports & Saloons. That was enough to give me the bug again and I decided that Id enter a car into one of the SMRC Championships in 2012. The idea was to do it on a reasonable budget as Im not flush with cash. Im a BMW man through and through, and my first inclination was to find an E36 M3 Evo. It became clear that buying car and converting it or buying a car that had already been prepared was going to blow the whole years budget in one swoop so that was quickly ruled out. Then, one night in November, an advert appeared on Pistonheads for a race prepped VW Corrado G60 Turbo. This caught my eye as I used to own a VR6 Corrado and I feckin loved that car. It had been taken in as a trade-in by Ultima in p/x for one of their GTR's. By 11am the following day, I was in Leicester putting it on the back of a trailer. As you can see when we collected it, looked a bit like it had been crashed into the local Halfords: That didnt bother me, it was what was lying underneath that was of interest. The car was originally built by JabbaSport as a demo car in 2008 so first thing I did was get on to Kevin at JabbaSport who did the work on the car originally. We quickly established the spec was as follows: Hybrid IHI VF22 Turbo Custom intercooler and radiator package custom made by Pro-Alloy Motorsport. G60 8v 1800cc bored out to 1900cc Scat 144mm H-Beam Rods JE forged pistons Ported and gas-flowed head with large inlet valves, custom Piper camshaft and vernier pulley. JabbaSport exhaust manifold and downpipe. Full PipeWerx de-cat-back exhaust sytem. 440cc injectors on 3.5bar fuel rail pressure. The car already had all the required safety devices installed and was running a front BBK (Wilwood 310mm), Peloquin torque biasing diff, Poly-bished all-round, KW Competition coilover with custom spring rates, uprated Neuspeed ARBs all round and 16 Compomotive MO5s shod in Yokohama A048Rs. It really was ready to go racing. It was a frustrating winter with the car sitting there unable to do any track time. So that gave me a bit of time to tidy up the bodywork. I managed to take as spares two doors, two front panels and a bonnet when we got the car and they were quickly put to good use on the passenger side of the car which had some lovin with a tyre wall at some point in its previous life. All the decals were removed taking half the lacquer with them! First track day saw me have a rather large off in torrential conditions but this allowed me to ditch the splitter and get a new bumper fitted. The BGW was also replaced with an original VW item: Some images from one of the first the track outings are below: More to follow.....
