On lap seven the word STOP appeared on my dashboard

Ayear ago I used to take part in the UAE production car series in a 2004 Porsche GT3.  In the last race weekend of that season a fellow competitor in a Porsche hit the wall, utterly destroying his car.  I decided I did not want to risk my immaculate GT3 on the track any longer, which is why it is now back to being exclusively a road car and why I jointly bought this Golf GTI with Martin Baerschmidt, who raced the car last month (evo-me 028) before handing over to me this month.

Following that first race we had a long list of items for Octane garage, our sponsor, to carry out.  The most important was to reduce the weight of the car by gutting the doors and removing the electric windows and dashboard.  A concession we made was to keep the air conditioning. I know, I know, it’s an extra 60 kilograms of non-essential weight in the car. But the car is road legal, and we drive it back and forth to the track. We then flushed all the fluids in the car, including brake and power steering fluid, gearbox and engine oil, coolant fluid and the oil filter.  We checked the spark plugs and could not change the air filter as the entire air intake assembly was removed! I quickly ordered and fitted a free flow air filter from Neuspeed.

Following the first race weekend we noticed that the engine had consumed all the oil (it went from the max mark to the min mark) and it was very dirty.  We added an oil additive that seemed to miraculously cure the oil consumption problem.  We had the fire extinguisher serviced, and installed two new kill switch cables to replace the old dry and rusty ones.  We then fitted new stiffer race bushings to help remove some of the play in the suspension, lowered the car, aligned it, rolled the fenders as the tyres were rubbing on them, added a Hans device-compatible belt (a two-inch belt as opposed to the three-inch standard one), hooked up the drift box, polished the car and stickered it up. We were ready to go racing again.

And so to the next race weekend: I qualified 23rd and last, running five seconds a lap slower than the fastest Golf, which was an improvement over the previous race, where we were running about 6.5sec per lap slower.  The car was still understeering quite a bit, which calls for quite some work to be done on the setup.

In the race I had a good start, made up four positions and was able to keep my competitors behind me for a while. Only problem is we were running on the Club circuit configuration (plenty of curves, one straight portion), which left me worrying about the brakes and engine getting enough cooling - I was revving to 7,000rpm in third in turn one as shifting into fourth was much slower.

On lap seven I had a critical coolant loss warning and the word “STOP” appeared on my dashboard.  I stopped immediately to save the engine.  I drove the car back to the pits at the end of the race and I was ready to call it a day.  We had no tools, did not know where the leak was coming from, and certainly no expertise to do anything about it.

At that point Martin refused to give up and fellow competitors and mechanics helped check the car and fixed it.  Martin wanted me on the grid for the second race, even if the fix made us last only one lap.  I decided to take it easy on the engine and short-shift to keep things cooler.  I started the second race in 22nd position because of my DNF and with one competitor dropping out.  I had a good start, but I could not shift as fast as I wanted to as the gear selector needed to be engaged carefully.  I battled with a pink colored Hello Kitty-branded Honda Civic all the way to the finish line in 18th position.

As I came into the pits, I could not engage first or second, and the car was badly misfiring.  Back at the workshop, Octane traced the misfiring to a dirty airflow sensor, and they could not believe their eyes when they took the gearbox apart; shards of clutch material were dropping out of the engine. And then the entire clutch fell out in three large pieces.  They could not believe that a car could actually run like that, let alone finish a race! Lets hope our Golf holds up better next time around.