Southern African Endurance Series Expands with V8 SuperCup Class in 2023
The Southern African Endurance Series has had a year of new growth with its new owners Xolile Letlaka and Izak Spies under the management of Wayne Riddell and his exclusive team.
“We adopted a year of class consolidation down from the original 15 classes previously run to just the top 5 that showed us where the most competitors enjoyed racing. This move allowed the competitors to race in bigger classes and gave us the opportunity to stabilise our competitor offerings. This move, coupled with the new look and feel of our corporate identity gave us the perfect opportunity to show our customers that we are not only here to stay but want to grow endurance racing to levels last seen in the early eighties,” said Riddell.
Spies added that, “Now that our customers have seen what we are capable of, we are experiencing several people returning to the sport. This is especially true within the V8 racing space. Many stalwarts of yesteryears V8 racing who still have V8 machinery in their garages, have seen the value proposition we offer the endurance competitors. The costs per hour of actual on track time in South Africa is on average 3 times cheaper with us than conventional sprint racing of 10 to 12 lap races currently on offer. Besides, I have many V8 cars of my own in my racing garage that are just sitting on jacks under cover.”
“We went to PE last month with a V8 car and entered it into the Open class as a test. We were blown away with the ability of the cars performance in relation to the field currently competing in the Open Class “A” field. All we need to do is upgrade the fuel refill system to accommodate safety with pit-stops.” Spies continued.
Riddell said that they intend to offer the V8 SuperCup Club Class competitors a similar offering of that currently the SA GT competitors enjoy, with the running of 2 x 1-hour races. We will offer the V8 owners 3 opportunities of class, like that of the SA GT field. These will be V8 Open, V8 Limited, and V8 Classic.
The V8 Open is for unrestricted V8 Space Framed cars, the Limited class will be inline with current series regulations, that will allow current competitors to try out endurance racing with their cars without having to alter or modify them too much and the V8 Classics will be for non-space framed cars of yesteryear. The only difference to that of the SA GT cars is that the V8’s will run 1 hour alone and then the second 1-hour race will form part of the first hour of the 3-hour endurance races. The reason for this is it will allow those competitors who wish to continue and race the full 3 hours can just continue to race for the remaining 2 hours. This will give them even a better value proposition of OnTrack costs.
The series regulators are currently tweaking the final rule set in preparation for the 2023 season that will see a 5 round championship commencing in the first quarter of the 2023 season and end with the now much talked about annual 9-hour early in December.