GEROTEK

Testing Facility

08 February 2004

Sponsored by

and

AQUAMIST

By 6.30 am almost all participants had arrived. Registration and signing of indemnity forms took place and by sometime after 7.00 am, we drove to the strip, which turned out to be only suitable for 800 m and not 1000 m as we originally thought.

We saw an excellent turn out, with 28 Audis, of which 2 did not run the trials, understandably being a very new Avus Silver RS6 (with a very unique interior) and a stunning Red A4 1.8T 140kW also just out of the box. We also had a Mercedes E55, a BMW M3 CSL, a BMW M3 (E46), a very fast Nissan Sentra Turbo, a VW GTi "slightly" modified which was quicker than any S3's, and two Opel Astra Coupé.

The time and speed trials were monitored by Gert Vorster with his GPS Racelogic V-Box. The whole morning Gert worked non stop, except for the time he had his two runs. What a great job he did, for both his runs and the data collection.

Your Chairman was "slightly" unhappy with his RS6 not performing. As it turns out his RS6's Dump Valves had packed up, and due to this the RS6's protection systems came into play and limited to boost to 0.6 bar instead of 0.9 bar. It seems as if Audi/Bosch will never get those DV's right!

Andre Baars RS6 did an excellent time, specially considering that he was running straight 93 octane fuel, whereas most of everybody else had race fuel or race fuel mixtures of much greater octane.

Des, our KZN Committee member, did the best S3 time. Well, well, GP members what have you got to say about that? The two S4's were pretty even with Gary having the better launch and times, and Rob the better top speed by over 14 km/h. Arno had the fastest A3 1.8T, Pradeep the fastest A4 1.8T, very close to that of John's A4 1.8T and Robert the fastest urS6 (C4 platform S6), beating Grant by only 0.01 second. However Grant was quicker to 100 km/h and for the quarter mile.

Philips' S6 was not performing due to a very dirty air filter, which he discovered the next day.

The track had a lot of grip, but turned out slower times and speeds that at Wesbank or ODI.

The most impressive launches were those of Philip in his S2/RS2 and John in his M3 CSL. However in his second run, the CSL launch control did not want to work, as BMW has built-in a protection which cancels the launch control if the ambient temperature is above 25ºC or thereabouts. Well that's what we were told.

Also very impressive was MW's Nissan Sentra STi Turbo's top speed, a shade below 210 km/h at the 800m mark.

All in all it was great fun and very interesting to see how the Audis performed versus icons such as the MB E55, the M3 CSL and the M3 on the same piece of track and under the very same conditions.

The importer of Lidatek's Laser Echo kindly lent us a LTI Ultra Lyte 100 LR Laser Gun and we were thus able to check all the cars which had a laser jammer, that their devices were working properly. This also allowed us to better understand the limitation of such devices. Like for instance the distance at which they are unable to jam (below 100/150 metres) and the time they jam the laser signal (between 2 and 5 seconds depending on the Laser Gun model). 

Many thanks to Gert Vorster for organising the event, making his testing equipment available and collecting all the data. Thanks as well to Arno Gerber for making up the indemnity forms and making sure everybody had filled them in properly.

Due to the generous sponsorship of Revo Technik (performance sotfware/chips) and Aquamist (water injection systems), all the participant did not have to contribute to anything. Thanks to Nick Weinmann (Revo) for bringing along cool drinks, very nice thought!

The results have been compiled according to the best 800m time, as it is common practice at official Quarter mile or 800m trials, such as Tarlton. It does make sense, as the objective is to be the quickest over a certain distance. You will note that in some cases the quickest (time) were not always the fastest (speed) and vice versa. Some, unfortunately slowed down before the 800m line which by the way was marked with orange cones. This was the case, amongst others, of the E55, but he still managed 209 km at 740 metres, which, if he had kept his right foot on the pedal would have given him a probable speed of 215 km/h at the 800m.... Only the best of the two runs is shown on the table or a combination thereof.

The results are below

André van den Heuvel