On Friday the 16 September, me and Matt entered the Audi A8 track car into the PPC Practical Performance Car £999 challenge.
The first thing is they couldn’t decide if we could enter because the Audi cost us £1500 3 years ago (You can buy a 4.2 Audi A8 with less miles for around £600 on ebay now!). The moderator on the forum and member of staff said yes, other staff person said no?
We arrived on the Friday just after 9am to people stripping as much weight as possible out of there cars, some other people looking very hungover. We signed on to the track and the chap said the should be no problem with the Audi taking part. Matt had completed the 3 runs and managed 14.3 every run.
As the 3 runs were complete in under an hour they let everyone have more runs until they closed for lunch, we removed the spare wheel and some junk in the boot, back round for a 14.4 run!!!! oh well Matt tired again and 14.2 this time. We let the car cool down and gave it one last session before lunch 14.1 this time and the chap doing commentary saying the Audi A8 is in 3rd place overall, Just before lunch a Subaru STi ran 13.3, this placed him in first place and knocking the Audi to 4th place.
After we stopped for lunch the handling test started, All the cars queued up and they went through the course. The course started by weaving in and out of 4 cones in a straight line then onto and figure of 8 around 2 cones then come to a stop in a box made of 4 cones (5 second penalty for any cone knocked over), Simple we thought.
The first couple of people went and only 1 managed to go the correct way around the course. After the first round the fastest time was 26.3 seconds with the Audi managing 26.6 seconds. A second round went past and times were improved with some people breaking the 25 second mark and some people struggling to stay in a straight line ;-). Then came the 3rd run, some more people broke the 25 seconds with the Audi finishing on 25.3 seconds and a MR2 running 24.4 seconds in first place.
After this all finished the staff went to work out positions, They announced the results:
1st Place – Toyota MR2 – 14.43 – 24.41 – 38.84
2nd Place – Impezza STi – 13.33 – 25.72 – 39.05
3rd Place – Scooby WRX – 14.46 – 25.47 – 39.93
Oh where is the Audi in the results? Turns out they decided there and then that it not allowed to take part, So there no mention of the Audi in any of the results 🙁
Hi Toby. I ran the multi-coloured Celica at the £999 Event, placed quite low down in the results but it was completely standard, no Turbo, no NOS…nothing. My best Drag run was a 16.5 !!! I couldn’t see a problem with the Audi being allowed to enter & I think most of the other Forum Members felt the same. Just love your photo’s on Flickr…. awesome! Any chance you could email me some of the photo’s of my car? Like the one where I’m doing my Burn-Out & a couple on the Drag Strip? I will be putting the Celica up for sale on ebay soon & would like to put some of your photo’s in the Listing if that’s ok with you. Thanks in advance. Pete