Born free

With few technical regulations World Time Attack Challenge is racecar design heaven, but what sort of machine results when you’re not hamstrung by the rules? To find out we asked one of the men behind the 2019-winning Porsche 968-derived RP968 to talk us through its development

- Dejan Ninic

If you have never heard of an Australian racecar known as RP968, then you’re in for a treat. For while it might not have a flashy name, this is by no means an understated car. It’s also a mighty quick machine, as back to back World Time Attack Challenge (WTAC) victories attest.

Regular readers of Racecar will be familiar with WTAC from a number of Danny Nowlan’s features. In a nutshell this Australian series is close to anything-goes, over one lap against the clock; a recipe which throws up some very dramatic looking racecars. RP968 is no exception, but here we intend to go beyond the huge wings and reveal the real numbers, the actual data and the design philosophy behind this phenomenal racecar.

But first, that name. The ‘968’ part of it is from the base car, a Porsche of that type, while the ‘RP’ stands for Rod Pobestek, the owner and the person behind the project, a man who said: ‘I don’t care about winning the event, I want to make the fastest car possible’, after I expressed my extreme satisfaction that the lap-time of 1:19.2778 just posted by driver Bart Mawer was fast enough to set a new tin-top lap record at Sydney Motorsport Park (SMP) and, very likely, fast enough to win the WTAC event.

Pobestek, you see, had greater expectations and his goal was actually to set a new outright lap record, to beat the lap time that was achieved by the A1GP car driven by Nico Hulkenberg back in 2007, a 1:19.142. But then that’s Pobestek, he’s extremely competitive.