Words: Dipayan Dutta
Photography: Volkswagen Motorsport
A hot mess. Sweat pouring from orifices I didn’t know existed. Brain turned to mush from the barely-silenced, twin-charged, in-line four on steroids. Blistered hands from the steering wheel. Not to mention the merciless beating my body was taking courtesy a relentless effort to shave half a second from my lap time. This was me about two weeks ago at the Kari Motor Speedway. Right now, sitting in the air conditioned comfort of our office with the aroma of a nice Earl Grey wafting through, I can’t remember why I put myself through all of this. I mean, there was no competition. I wasn’t going to win anything for being the fastest media boffin to go round the track. Neither was the editor going to hand me the keys to his rally car. Yet, on the track, lap times were all that mattered. The world could have gone nuclear and I’d still be beating down that track trying to find half a second. That’s what a race car does to a reasonably sane person.
I loved it. Every moronic inch of it. The way it sounds at full chat made me weak in the knees. The DSG gearbox with the paddle shifters make you feel like an F1 driver. The way the suspension shatters your spinal cord when you take the chicane at Kari on exactly the right line in fourth gear. The suffocating smell of 100-octane fuel with a hint of boiling rubber that filters into the cabin and stays there. Heck, I even loved the five-point harness that, I’m sure, will result in no Dutta progeny for the next couple of years.
The car we’re driving is the Volkswagen Vento Cup race car and the idea is to see how much better it is than the Polo R Cup it replaces. Now on paper everything remains the same including the 180bhp 1.4 TSI engine. But unlike the TSI engines in the road car, here forced induction is graciously provided by a turbocharger and a supercharger. Race-spec limited-slip differential ensures that all that power isn’t wasted away by a spinning inside wheel on tight corners. Race ABS, by Bosch, is far more sensitive than regular road-car ABS and together with race-spec brake discs and pads, results in fantastic deceleration allowing even a monkey like me to pile into corners hard on the brakes without locking up and understeering. VW says that the main difference between the old and new race cars is the addition of the boot which, weirdly enough, has a dynamic upside. Proof? They say in pre-season testing itself the Vento was almost half a second faster around the 3.2km long Kari Motor Speedway than the Polo.
Reading numbers off a piece of paper is one thing, watching those numbers blow you past 200kmph with the pit wall just a few inches away is quite the other. Once we were strapped in, Rayomand Banajee a.k.a Rayo – who trains the drivers for the Cup— gave us a quick brief and after realising that most of us were too wired to pay attention, took us out for a couple of sighting laps. Sighting done, we were let loose on the track.
I considered giving myself a few laps to learn the track and line before settling into a fast(ish) pace. But almost immediately that fleeting moment of better judgement left me. Right foot meet floor well. Pushed back in the OMP racing seat, I realised exactly how much difference those numbers and pages and pages of jargon actually make. You instantly get the sense that there is no mucking about in a car like this. It cuts through the track with precision like you would not believe, it brakes like it’s hit a brick wall, and it goes like a stabbed rat. Add all that up and it’s not a far shot as to how I ended up in said predicament to begin with. Lap after lap one eye was on the logger checking lap times. The faster I got, the faster I wanted to go. It was like some sort of crazed disease.
Then it hit me, this car is meant to do exactly that. The Vento Cup is designed to infuse this exact fever into young enthusiasts looking for that break into motorsport. It’s supposed to make you want to push yourself harder, drive a little faster and brake a little later. It’s supposed to turn karting maniacs into world class drivers and unearth the next Narain Karthikeyan. Now if only I had the talent to begin with…
If you’d like to race in the Vento Cup Car in the next season, visit volkswagen-motorsport.in and stay tuned for updates. It costs 8 lakh per season to participate.