Racing in Bacolod and Davao goes full throttle

Atty. Jerome G. Neri
The Scrutineer

I WOULD like to congratulate my good friend and client Trunkx Adarna for winning the overall championship in the recently concluded Karera sa Bacolod Drag race. Trunkx drove his 2008 Subaru STI to the win. What was interesting is that in the finals he was going against a Mitsubishi EVO 3 race car driven by Bacolod’s Ricky dela Rama, while the Subaru STI of Trunkx was a complete streetcar with aircon and all accessories on it, meaning is was about 300 to 400 kilograms heavier than Ricky’s EVO 3 stripped out race car.

It was a really good race for my shop, Group B Automotive and Tuning. In a drag race, the eight quickest cars race heads up for the overall championship as determined by the elapsed times posted during qualifying.

Of the quickest eight cars, six of them were tuned in the dynamometer of Group B, five of which were tuned by me, including the Championship winning Subaru STI of Trunkx. The results are a testament to the quality of the tuning done at Group B Automotive, as the cars are not only dyno tuned but proven to perform on the racetrack.

AUTOCROSS EVENT. Apart from the drag race, there was also an autocross event where Cebuano Jette Calderon in his Mazda Miata finished second to the champion Mark Vasquez of Bacolod in his Honda CRX.

For the first time, Racing Line TV designed a nice, safe and proper Autocross racetrack. Unlike all their other previous Autocross tracks they designed where 99 percent of the time you are in first gear negotiating what I would term as “mickey mouse” corners, the layout for this race was just awesome, as it had slow and medium corners with a fast straight and hard braking. I hope Racing Line TV will continue to make similar track layouts for the future races and not revert back to those “mickey mouse” track layouts.

Having races that are this good in a controlled and safe envirionment in the Visayas would not have been possible without the help of Philippine Airlines (PAL) as they allowed us gearheads to use their property in the Old Bacolod Airport. We in the motorsports community are very thankful to PAL.

DAVAO TUNING. After the Bacolod race, I travelled to Davao to tune some cars. At the back of my mind, I was thinking that it would be kind of useless to tune cars in a place where there is a 30kph speed limit that is very strictly implemented. I was also wondering how far out of Davao City we would have to go in order to do a tune? It turns out that motorsports is very alive in Davao, as there is a private development just a few minutes from the Airport that the petrol heads over there use as a venue for racing. Davao holds about four races a year and their racing community has been growing.

Usually, people who ask me to tune their cars for them are between 30 to 45 years old. My Davao clients were different – they were in their mid to late 50s. What surprised me most about them was that they could drive and they drove well. Apparently, the members of the Davao Sports Car Club enrolled at the Tuason Racing School in Manila and had proper high performance driving lessons. Having proper driving lessons is very helpful for car clubs that do a lot of long drives, as one gets a better understanding of how the car behaves and therefore be a safer driver.