Quote:
Originally Posted by Willmaz223
Isn't that the Australian Veskanda . Quite a unique car.
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I remember the car well, as I do the time the World Sports cars came to Sandown '1000' in 1984.... they buggered up the original track layout by adding a Mickey Mouse section at the end of the back straight to bring the track length up to the requirement for the World Championship of Makes regs. They called it the International Circuit. It was a horrid change and took away the fast left hand sweeper (a real tighten your belts big cohones test of courage) from the back straight down to Dandenong Road Corner, replacing it with a horrible hairpin.
Stefan Bellof and Derek Bell in their Rothmans Porsche 956 won what was a one off race down here.(The next two events were cancelled). I recall Jack Brabham, Alan Jones and Vern Schuppan also ran in factory Porsches. I also remember the race, scheduled to be 1000 klms had to be shortened by a big chunk because the Mickey Mouse bit added so much to the lap time (20sec/lap) that the race ran over the 6 hour time limit, losing about 200 klms from memory. It went from 8 turns to 13 turns, two of which were hairpins with two other tight turns.
As an aside I think the Veskanda did not make the race but was built primarily to take part in the cancelled 1985 event. It was built for a local photographer, Bernie Van Elsen by K&A Engineering. (Hence the name -
Van
Elsen
Special
K AND A
It did however clean up in the local Sports Car Championship with John Bowe at the wheel and is still considered the fastest ever Aussie made sportscar. It did however get to race against the Porsche 956 many years later in the 2011 Phillip Island Historics. I think it also ran in a Le Mans Legends race and also Sandown Historics, and Paul Stubber (who Iain met at P.I) ran it at Nurburgring a few years ago.
Video of the car at the 'Ring :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sylgz-AwJCc
Unfortunately we had to live with the Mickey Mouse section for too many years after, with it being changed back not until about 1990..
I wont post a pic of the layout here to not detract from the thread, (I feel guilty of that already with this waffle) but for those interested you can see what I mean here:
https://www.racingcircuits.info/asse...dbed8dcc4e.png