Team & Driver Features
Van Der Steur Gets A New Toy
By Text: Jimmy Sykes
Sep 13, 2006, 23:16

On March 15th 2005, Radical Sportscars announced its intentions to build a prototype built to the ACO Le Mans P2 rules package. They contracted the man responsible for the Le Mans winning Bentley design, Peter Elleray, to help in the design and on the surface it looked like they were going to have a winning package. Rollcentre Racing took delivery of the first SR9 P2 cars and have been showing that the cars have great potential.

So, when the van der Steur Racing team announced in mid ’06 that they would be taking delivery of the third version of this highly acclaimed car, people took notice. Unfortunately, they did not get the car as fast as they might have hoped and the car just arrived into the country within the last few weeks. So it was no wonder that Ben Devlin and Gunnar van der Steur both had big grins on their faces today at Summit Point Raceway where they were going to shake down their new toy for the first time.


I arrived at the track at about 11 am, it was cool and cloudy. The car was sitting on its air jacks with no wheels and no body work and the team, for a lack of a better description, standing around. Gunnar informed me that they had taken their wheels into town to have rains mounted since it looked like it was going to rain. With the car being so new, the only set of wheels they had were the ones that were delivered with the car, their extra sets of BBS wheels were not scheduled to be delivered till the end of the week. So it was a matter of having to keep rotating tires on the one set of wheels. After some time, they still did not have their rains mounted and it looked like the rain might hold off, so Gunnar and Ben made the decision to just bring them back and they will run on the drys, which turned out to be the right decision as we did not see any rain all day long. Those tires were Kumhos, though they had a stack of Dunlops sitting there as well (as were the rains). When asked, they seemed to indicate that they would likely be on the Kumhos as it was a better "business decision," though Ben seemed to long for his British Dunlops. We'll see how that pans out. The car was dressed in all its carbon fiber glory, with a hint of the famous “VDS baby blue” on the nose, behind the roll hoops and on the rear wing endplates. Gunnar said it will remain in this livery till the end of the year and they would give it a proper paint job for ’07.


Watching Ben, you could see that he was like a kid with a new toy and the waiting was killing him. Not long after noon two guys returned with the wheels and tires, they mounted them up and they were ready to hit the track for the first time. Ben had the pleasure of being the first and went out onto the cold track on cold tires and did one lap very gingerly to make sure all was working right. He then proceeded to do several more laps at a nice easy pace, just getting a feel for the car and breaking it in slowly.

And so the day unfolded. Gunnar and Ben took turns shaking down the new car, with each session, increasing their speed and aggression. They did not run into any problems, the car ran well, they had no “offs” and everything went extremely smooth. In the end, they got the car down into the one minute, eight second lap times. Ben informed me that this was faster than they normally ran with their old car and that they were hardly pushing this one at all and were only running partial boost on the engine. He thought that the car had another five seconds in it easily when fully ready. This bodes very well for the new ride and once they get the car fully sorted should be a car to watch in the LMP2 category. We’ll find out in a couple weeks at Road Atlanta when the car makes its second appearance on track during its racing debut. They did say the Kumhos held up really well, though they could be a little softer.


On an amusing side note, there was another driver there testing his Radical sportscar that looked to be outfitted for SCCA D sports racer spec. At one point I was waiting for the VDS car to come back out on track and saw this yellow sports racer come flying down “The Chute.” I thought to myself, “boy that guy really has picked up the pace from earlier in the day.” Then I realized it was Ben in the car. I asked him later about it and he said that he took it out for three laps for the guy to help him tune it as he races in the Radical racing series in the U.K. However, he thought the guy may not have been real happy about it as in those three laps he went about six seconds faster than the other guy did all day. Looks like Ben and Radical may be a good combination.

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