Extreme Festival
Extreme Festival national championship racing returns to Killarney International Raceway for the first time in almost two years on Saturday 20 March with a fresh look, a new line-up and a much improved headline category.
The major complaints about South Africa’s premier circuit racing series have always centred around the small fields and the reliability problems of the Global Touring Cars. Both of these issues have now been addressed during the enforced layoff caused by the Covid-19 restrictions.
The first batch of GTC chassis – some of which are now six years old – were prone to cracking and, while their Life ECUs are the best in the business, the original wiring looms were not.
The 2021-specification GTC cars now have the correct chrome molybdenum steel chassis and race-specification wiring looms to match those ECUs. The teams have already completed testing laps equivalent to a full season’s racing without any problems, so we can finally expect to see GTC racing reach its full exciting potential.
Toyota Gazoo Racing and Investchem Racing have each entered a pair of Toyota Corolla GTCs, multiple SA champion Jeffrey Kruger is in with a BMW 2 Series Coupe GTC and there is also a privately entered Ford Focus GTC.
That’s a guaranteed entry of six cars; another two cars are expected to join the field in time for the first round at Killarney, while Volkswagen’s plans with the new Golf 8 GTi are yet to be confirmed. With eight to ten GTC cars and a similar number of Super Polos right behind them, expect to see up to 20 cars in action in the headline races at the Extreme Festival in 2021.
Joining the GTC and Super Polo squads at the Killarney Extreme Festival will be the one-make Volkswagen Polo Cup racers, always good for big fields, doorhandle to doorhandle, paint-rubbing racing and plenty of off-track excursions, as well as the Investchem Formula 1600 single-seaters and two new categories – the G&H Transport Extreme Supercars and Mobil 1 V8 Supercars.
Expect to see exotics such as Ferraris, Lamborghinis, M-Class BMW’s and a gaggle of hot Porsches – including a few local entries – in the Supercar races, while the Mobil 1 V8 Supercars are actually the iconic WesBank V8s, thundering back to deliver racing as intense, as noisy and as close as in the ‘good old days’, in many cases with the same drivers!
Motorcycle racing fans can look forward to Round 1 of the NGK SA Superbike Series, with seven times SA champion Clinton Seller – still with backing from King Price but now on a Honda – facing the cream of South African riders, including our very own David ‘McFlash’ McFadden on the StuntSA/Mad Macs R1 and Garrick Vlok (DCCS Yamaha R1).
We also welcome back some old friends (pun intended – you have to be over 30 to compete and some of the riders are in their 50s) in the SunBet ZX10 Masters Cup, and the hard-riding Bridgestone Superbikes, a National Challenge series for motorcycles of 600cc or larger capacity, with quite a wide range of modifications allowed.
The Bridgestone Superbikes run together with the NGK SA Superbike series, delivering larger fields and the intense racing that gives the national racing series its name – the Extreme Festival.