Tag: R Gruppe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gat1PpdtUH4

Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking Woodstock, our 1973 S/RSR out of the barn to pick up parts at our client Blankemeijer. The engine loosened up considerably over the course of the day and although I didn’t rev the new 3.0 RSR block too highly, it felt great. It was a rainy day, there is no heating in this car and I was wearing a woolen hat, gloves and thermal underwear to be able to put up with the temperatures… Thank God all that was enough to stay warm. The engine is relatively mild (as far as RSR engine can be…), as we have used S cams, but torque is already massive. In traffic on the Rotterdam ring road I stood on the throttle in 2nd and I fishtailed towards the next car!

What constitutes an R Gruppe car is a question I get asked frequently and it’s time I try to answer that question. As the European Chaptermeister of R Gruppe I should know, right? Well, it’s not so cut and dry…. There isn’t one right answer to this question. There isn’t just a single model or configuration that complies with the definition “R Gruppe car”. The one thing they have to meet is the hurdle of a 1964-1973 chassis number and the car must be a 911. So clones based on later chassis (backdates), strictly speaking, are not invited in.

If we listen to the founders of our Gruppe, Freeman Thomas and Cris Huergas, then we can narrow it down a bit. In a recent web interview (http://unobtaniuminc.wordpress.com/2009/12/) Cris said: “Each R Gruppe car is an extension of its owners and their creativity in building something that adds a sporting flavor to their 911s. Anybody can [...]

Now that The Winter Trial is behind us and Silverado has returned to TwinSpark Central to be serviced, it is time to evaluate how it behaved and what we have learned.

Tyres
We ran Vredestein SnowTrac2 15x6x185 in the front and the same size SnowTrac3 in the rear. The rear tyres were changed at the eleventh hour, when a blister had appeared on one of the 1 year old SnowTrac2’s. The Snowtrac3’s initially felt weak due to their soft side walls, but once the car was fully loaded and we had covered some distance, they seemed firmer. Steering became more twitchy when running without spares, luggage and co-driver and I’m convinced this had to do with the rear tyres in combination with the 26 mm rear torsion bars. Job for the next time: find snow tyres with stiffer side walls, but with the solid traction of this type of profile: we never had to [...]