South
African BMW race rep and tuning experts, team SavSpeed racing, revealed their
brand new BMW F30 wide body racer at Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit recently at one
of the BMW car club Gauteng’s track and race days. This was the first full
shakedown of the car in proper race trim and there was no better place to do it
than in front of a crowd of BMW enthusiasts and at a race series that the car
was ultimately built to compete in.
Very
briefly, this menacing and purposeful looking race car features a Team SavSpeed
racing fettled turbo-charged 3.0 lire BMW straight six power plant producing
over 800hp to go with the all the other hardcore race prep goodies required to
lap a circuit in anger, and put the F30 wide body at the top of the timesheets.
This demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the car has the go to match the
show.
The car as modified and built by owner/driver Sav Gualtieri, a
BMW technician with over 25 years experience, and his team at their workshop in
Edencale. Team SavSpeed racing has turbo-charged over 200 vehicles and modified
even more over the last two decades, both for street and track applications.
Over
time this has secured the team and its customers many championships and the odd
South African speed record in both street and track discipline over the years.
“We are just so pleased that we have created the first wide body BMW F30 racer
in the world and want to show just how good the new car is as a base to work
with” says Gualtieri. “ along with Tony Colaro, our body work and aerodynamic
specialist, we created a bespoke aero package for the car where form follows function.”
The previous team SavSpeed racing car received much acclaim and consistently
proved it to be the fastest BMW at any track in South Africa over and over and
was retired at the top of its game. But the BMW E36 based car was simply
outdated despite having had an incredible racing service life of almost eight
years.
The
BMW F30 wide body project was inspired by wanting to progress to the latest
technology and show how much better a more contemporary BMW model is in its
dynamic prowess. Gualtieri adds, “The car ran well at Kyalami but there is
still a lot of work that needs to be done. I can’t realistically claim that the
car is right on the pace yet. We will obviously keep working on it, but i don’t
want to get carried away with lap times and predictions until we are completely
happy with the entire package.”
Concluding Gualtieri continues, “The only way to get it right is
to race it on track, so we will be aiming to enter out F30 wide body in the
last two rounds of the BMW CCG club racing series on the 1st and 29th
of November, and maybe even in the G&H transport extreme supercars series
on 15th November.”
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