Tired of your clients being pelted with used chicken bones at Martinsville but love the wheel-to-wheel fender-rubbing action? Need to step up a level in competition now that your new 911 GT3 has arrived? Realize your B-to-B meetings would benefit from the rarified air only Formula One can provide but you can't afford Michael's tire bill, let alone his salary? Well, step right up and let me tell you about the best value in motorsports, the Porsche Pirelli Supercup.
The world's fastest single-marque series, the Supercup is the only series to support all ten European and the one American F1 rounds. The association with F1 is, said Porsche's Wilfied Muller, "a strong plus for the teams competing here. Many of the team owners run mid-size enterprises and they all use the Supercup and the Formula One environment as a platform for B-to-B business. I think they are very happy with this. We also feel quite flattered that the organizers said, and Bernie Ecclestone said, 'The show is quite good, so you should do two races [here at Indianapolis].'"
"The main idea," continued Muller, "behind the Supercup is to give customers who want to go racing with their 911s an opportunity to race with near standard cars that are not too expensive. The second aspect of the Supercup is to have an image transfer from the racing 911 to the road car. At the moment this is what Porsche Motorsport is. That's quite a lot. From the new GT3 Cup car we are going to build 150 units; last year we built 114, a new production record for a near standard racing car. Porsche customers are racing these cars all over the world. All of them will be raced-well, maybe only 149. One may stay behind in Weissach as a rolling laboratory."
"We're giving talented drivers a chance to show and prove their talent with identical materials," said Supercup boss Uwe Brettel, "no matter what their budget is. They all run with relatively the same budget. At the end it is really the basic start of Porsche Motorsport; we give the customers a chance to enjoy our product! (The average budget for a European team, including the car, insurance, testing, spares and travel is $250,000 to $300,000 a year compared to Ferrari's F1 rumored $300 million, which Porsche helps to offset with a prize pool of $500,000.) Compared to other series, Supercup is a good value." Added Muller, "For this money you can't even get a gearbox in the DTM!"
The Supercup is without a doubt a driver's series. "The cars are really identical," said newly crowned series champion Jorg Bergmeister. "It's up to the driver a lot; there's not so many things you can change on the car. You can adjust the ride height a little bit, the camber, the toe and the tire pressure-things like that. But nothing more. You are not allowed to change the springs or dampers."
The swaybars and new rear wing, with double last year's downforce, are also adjustable. A sleeve on the suspension controls the ride height and indirectly the maximum camber adjustment. There is time to be found in these changes, Bergmeister pointed out. "For sure you can find time, sometimes quite a lot, with the little changes. Just in the camber, 1 degree less is sometimes a second slower."
Tire strategy also plays a large part in a Supercup weekend. For Indy, with one practice session, two qualifying sessions and two 16-lap races, the teams were allotted three sets of Pirelli racing slicks. On managing tires Bergmeister said, "I used one set on the first qualifying and two sets on the second qualifying. In qualifying it is important to use the peak of the tires, and that's on the first lap. There is just one lap at optimum." Most teams heat cycle the tires once during qualifying and them save them for the race. "For the race you have to be quite careful with the tires and not overstress them too much. That's the most important thing," added Bergmeister.
The change to Hydraulic Valve Play Compensation (from the production car) in this year's GT3 Cup car's 370-bhp flat six simplified maintenance and reduced individual variances between engines to less than 3 percent. "We have a few gentleman drivers who tend to get a little hot-blooded and rev the engine to 9000 rpm, and then we have to open it," said Muller, but otherwise the factory sealed engines and gearboxes are good for the entire season. The numbered ECUs are stored at the factory between events and distributed for each event by a lottery system.
"There are no excuses," said 19-year-old American Gunnar Jeanette. "For those who don't like making excuses, you better get up front real quick. This is a great series that will really teach you how to become a driver."
A fact that Porsche, and the team managers of several top series, well recognize. Last year's Supercup champion Patrick Huisman and runner-up Bernd Maylander both left the series to compete in the prestigious DTM touring car championship. Porsche itself uses the Supercup and German Carrera Cup as driver development tools, fielding the UPS-sponsored two-car junior team. The junior team competes in the German series and visits the Supercup four times. Said Brettel, "We have a lot of fun. We give them a certain freedom and take off the pressure. It's like having children; you watch them growing. But, we compete with our clients with the junior team." About half the teams compete in both the Supercup and German Carrera Cup.
The 26-car fields are made up of three types of drivers. About one-third of the drivers are young guns like Bergmeister hoping to prove themselves and move on to the DTM, another third are seasoned veterans hired by teams and looking to stay sharp, with the last third being "gentleman drivers" joining the ultimate 911 club race. Less than a second usually separates the top three-quarters of the field's qualifying times and the races are fiercely competitive. There is plenty of paint swapping, and many cars sport a concave front bumper that is a perfect match to the GT3 Cup's rear bumper by race end.
Every Supercup race also has two celebrity guest drivers in factory-sponsored cars. Sports and entertainment figures and even the occasional F1 driver fill the seats. David Donohue and Sam Hornish Jr. were the fortunate guests at Indy. Said Donohue, "It's one of those career highlights; you don't need to fill in the details, just say, 'I drove at Indy in 2001!' It's just such a privilege to drive for Porsche here. Even though I have made a career of racing against them, I still love the marque."