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Woodstock in dogfight at Zandvoort; The Hulk in the background; during deciding race #6 of Dutch GT/TC Championship

What started as a nervous week full of last minute preparation, ended well with a satisfying class victory  for Team TwinSpark Racing on Sunday. Outgunned by low-flying Escorts and other more radical RSR’s, we scored a 4, 4 and 5 out of 22 cars, enough to add the points we needed for the Class championship.

The competing red and yellow ’74 911 RSR of Rolph Smulders crashed in lap two of qualifying, right in front of me, coming out of the Renault corner. Rolph bent the left front seriously, but got out without a scratch.However sad for him, this is what can happen when the pressure for the championship is on. We all go all out and that puts you over the edge on occasion…

Lex Proper drove The Hulk with its new 3.0 RSR engine on MFI and TwinSpark Racing's High Butterflies. Despite being limited to 5.000 revs he came in 7th in the last race. Great promise for next season!

Lex was driving the Hulk, our ’74 911 RSR, with a new radical engine. Unfortunately we had had no time to fine tune the settings of the engine and this limited Lex in pulling revs all the way. Despite this limitation he scored several top 7 positions, raising our expectations for this car next season. If any chassis can beat the Zakspeed Escort of Marcel Frijlink next year, it’s the Hulk.

Woodstock was sitting on Avon slicks for the first time and we needed to experiment with tire pressure during this weekend. In qualifying I should have gone in after two laps to check tire pressure, but instead missed the waving of the pitcrew several laps in a row. In the meanwhile I was wondering why Woodstock seemed to have decided to attempt to kill me, as I ended up with aggressive oversteer on every touch of the wheel… Obviously I was running more than 0,5 bar of pressure too much in the slicks! Despite all that I qualified 7th, although 3 seconds a lap slower than in May on the TB’s.

Having fixed the tire pressure for the race, I was soon closing in on my earlier pace and got to a 4th position on Saturday. Still, the tire situation was not optimal and I was uncomfortable with the behavior of the car. Despite the good result I carried an unsatisfied feeling home. Further analysis revealed that the alignment of the car was off from that set with the TBs on the car, so at least I understood what was happening.

Leonard Stolk chasing Jan van Elderen in the Mexico Blue IROC clone. One second later Van Elderen closes the door on the Orange Escort of Jan Willem Oosterhagen, who ended up kissing the left hand Armco...

The short gearbox with the WEVO Tall Boy prototype functioned great and put me into top revs in 5th at the braking point before the Tarzan corner. There were many tussles over the weekend with an increasing number of 911 participants and the photographers will have had a field day. Our TwinSpark RS spec engine ran like clockwork, as it seemed to like the shorter ratio of the gearbox. There was a bit more shifting involved this weekend, but I always had top revs within reach, giving that flexibility to pitch and yaw the car where needed.

Colorful train of RSRs typical for the GT/TC class in Dutch Championship

One of those situations involved the orange 934 clone coming down the straight into the Tarzan corner. He overtook me on power down the straight, but I managed to brake later and pip back to my earlier position by passing on the inside through the turn. A real crowd pleaser. I couldn’t hold my position eventually, but despite less power I managed to eek out the final bhps to stay within about 150 meters at the finish line.

We also had a slew of visitors coming to our pitbox, wanting to know more about running these early 911s in historic races and there will be several follow up conversations happening in the next few months.

Leonard gained a spot and lost one to the faster 934 bodied in the last lap of the last race to finish 5th. Enough to secure his class win and 2nd overall in the Championship NK GT/TC 2010

Looking back on the first full season of racing Woodstock with its new WEVO parts and TwinSpark bespoke products, I feel we have achieved a good result with a car that is as capable of winning on track as it is climbing French Col’s during the Bergmeister Tour. A compliment to Porsche’s technology and proof of TwinSpark Racing’s collective experience at putting together tough parts and tough cars.

Thanks to all those volunteers who helped us before and during our race weekends. You are now part of the TwinSpark Racing Team!