dream | act | succeed

As already presented in #118 Racing is life – Season 2 Episode 2 – The road map – My next steps in Motorsport you can see the next milestones towards my ambitions in motorsport.

For that, I have defined stage 1 as the following.

Stage 1 – Getting started

This stage stands for the beginning of my real life motorsport experience. It represents the next step, which I will do in the next 3-4 years. The main task of this phase is to get a race car and start to actually drive on racetracks.

Goal: Buying a car, transform it into a street legal race car, start to drive on circuits and on trackdays/ Touristenfahrten.

Finance: 100% my money

Time frame: 2020 – 2024

But what does that really mean?

First of all I need a car. This is clear. Because of the reason, that I will build a street legal race car, I need to have a look at both, the competition rules and the road approval laws. After that, I need to define the class where I want to start at. Well, seems like a rather complicated endeavor, right? Luckily I love challenges.

What kind of car do I want?

It needs to be a car with an automatic transmission. Why? Isn’t only racing with a manual transmission pure racing? Well, we can discuss about that, but in the end it doesn’t matter. I am not a professional race car driver, therefore the car needs to be as easy to drive as possible. And this means definitely an automatic transmission for the high stress situations on the Nordschleife when it is raining in the night, with heavy fog, and you try to overtake the slower car in front while the GT3 from behind is approaching with its headlights flashing like the sun has already risen. In that moment you will instantly notice the value of an easy to drive car. And changing gears perfectly with just one pull at the pedal is just brilliant.

Saving money is of course another thing I need to keep in mind. I am not a millionaire yet, therefore I need to chose a car suitable for the production series of the VLN.

Currently I have two cars with two different motor configurations in mind. The first one is a Porsche Cayman 981 S or non S and the other is a BMW 2er, the M235i or the 228i.

Starting off with the BMW, I can buy the car for around 25000€. This is of course still much money, but I will use this car as a “daily race car” and therefore want to have a good base to start with. On the other hand, there is of course the Porsche which is much more expensive. With currently around 38000€ to over 50000€, this is of course really a lot of money for that little car. But in the end, not the price of the car, but the running costs will be important, therefore I really need to figure out those numbers before buying something.

The longer I think about this, the harder it gets to decide. In the end, this is just a money topic. Starting with racing means only one thing. You will crash! Thinking that this will not happen to you? That is just stupid! If you do not crash, you do not push hard enough. I will crash! One day or another. And to be honest, do you want to start racing with a car that costs more than 60000€ with all the equipment? A hard decision. Really. Of course it would be awesome to have the Porsche, but I need to be realistic, right? 🙂 haha! No! #Porscheforlife

For the early beginning, the car can be a little bit expensive, because it will not be real wheel to wheel racing like a crazy man at the beginning. Later on in the VLN or the 24h race, this is just war. Touching another car should be avoided under any circumstances of course, but it still happens quite frequently and I am the one who needs to pay for the repair. But this is a topic for another time.

With my life schedule in mind, I will have a normal regular income again, starting in April 2021 when I will be finished with my masters degree. Therefore I will not buy the car yet, but maybe in the summer of next year or I will wait until I have found a job.

But let’s stay with: To be continued!

See you next time!