Volkswagen Motorsport team unveil racing plan

The Volkswagen Motorsport team demonstrated its 2018 circuit racing plans at the Zwartkops Raceway near Pretoria earlier this week. Topping the equipe’s efforts will be a two-vehicle Sasol Global Touring Car onslaught.

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The team’s two Jetta entries will again be in the hands of Mathew Hodges and Daniel Rowe, with the drivers performing incident-free shakedown sessions at Zwartkops.

The GTC Jettas are now being run by Nathans Motorsport, a change from 2017. Preparation specialist Michael Allers has joined the team, which have put a massive amount of development work in the off season.

Meanwhile, the RG Motorsport engineers will be responsible for the tuning of Volkswagen’s works racing engines. “We have made some significant operational changes, which we believe will give us the best opportunity to challenge for GTC race wins,” said Mike Rowe, head of Volkswagen Motorsport.

“Graeme Nathan’s expertise has led us to GTC2 titles in 2016 and 2017. He now has the added responsibility of the GTC cars, and we believe he is up for the challenge.”

Leading their GTC2 onslaught will be reigning South African champion Keagan Masters, returning for duty to defend his 2017 title in a works Golf GTI. Former privateer Adrian Wood will join the factory GTC2 team with backing from Kyocera in his Golf GTI. Equally important to Volkswagen will be the running of this season’s Engen Polo Cup championship, using all-new Polos with turbocharged two-litre GTI engines.

The Polos were handed to their 24 new owners last week, and ran at Zwartkops for the first time on Monday. “We are very happy with the performance of the cars so far – in fact, they are quicker than we had expected them to be, with no big reliability issues,” Rowe said.

“As we start a new phase of Engen Polo Cup in SA, it is great to be able to deliver a solid product to our competitors and for them to be quick out of the box.”

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Though test session times rarely accurately reflect coming trends, it might be worthwhile to note that Monday’s quickest drivers were Tasmin Pepper, Jason and Keegan Campos, reigning South African champion Devin Robertson, Jeffrey Kruger and newcomer Delon Thompson.

All of the factory Volkswagen cars and the Polo Cup contenders will race for the first time this year at Kyalami on Saturday, March 24, when the venue will host the opening round of this year’s Extreme Festival racing tour.

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