My Racing Roots Part 3.1: The Golf years.

Me in the Golf, coming around the tower turn.

Driving the Volkswagen Golf was truly a love hate relationship.  I loved the little car.  It was easy to drive, when you had the right wheels on it, and it was really easy to get in and out of.  But I had a lot of brake downs, mostly from the gear box to half shafts.

Yes, the car looks like a box but it did get up to about 140 mph.  It was also a special car.  This car was built as a race car by the Volkswagen factory.  It was first built to run in Showroom Stock B (SSB).  It had no Vin number, but came as a part number.  So this car was never a car that drove on the roads.  We were lucky to get it.  When it was done racing in SSB, it was to be crushed. 

The nice thing about this car was that it was ready to go.  It was the first car that we did not build.  We took off the stripes of the German Flag and added the red numbers of 95.  This was some what up holding the colors of team.  Red and white.  The Mazda's were red with white lettering.

This car was also something new for me.  This was a front wheel drive car.  So the first time I took the car out was at and ASRA track day at PIR.  We had drafted Jerry England to ride along with me to give me some pointers on driving a front wheel drive car.  Unfortunately, Jerry was in a lot of pain, and only able to ride with me for a few laps.  And this was Jerry's last time in a race car.

By February, 2002 we are  ready to take the Golf out for my first race in it.  This race was at Firebird East.  A small track, but still could be tricky.  When going through drivers school, they first full day of driving is on Firebird East.  So this was not an unknown track to me.  We would still be driving in the ITA class.  So I went out for practice and came back in and that is when I noticed that the car would not go into gear.  I got it into first and drove it to our pit area.  Got out of the car and told my dad what was going on.  He got in and confirmed I was right.  The gear box was broke.  Luckily we still had my Mazda, number 87, back at the house.  So we loaded up the car, and headed back home to get the other car.  From leaving the track, unloading and loading of cars, and driving back to the track, we were only gone for 1 and half hour.  That was pretty good, but that meant that I messed qualifying.  So I would have to start at the back.  I went in and checked in my log book.  That was a crazy race.  I raced so hard that I boiled the brake fluid.  But I pulled off a second in class.

We got the car fixed and it was some what of an uneventful year.  We started braking half shafts on the right side.  This was fixed by not buy the factory half shaft and going with an after market one.  After that we had no more half shaft problems.