What Mark Schwabenbauer loves about racing cars is the adrenalin rush of the back-and-forth battle on the track.
“Being so evenly matched, that’s the fun part of racing,” he said. “Sometimes he wins, sometimes you win, so it’s a lot of fun that way.”
The Morinville driver will race in the Eurasia Cup GT Invitational hosted by the Northern Alberta Sports Car Club on Saturday, July 21. The event is one of the Edmonton Indy weekend support races running at the Edmonton City Centre Airport.
It’s a big opportunity for Schwabenbauer and other area drivers because, with no tracks currently in Edmonton or Calgary, there aren’t many other local races.
“Unfortunately we don’t have a track to race at right now so the Indy is more or less the only race for all of us in the Eurasia Cup,” he said.
Schwabenbauer, 43, will be racing his 200-horsepower 1980 Volkswagen Scirocco in the GTP4 class for the fourth time. He has been a Volkswagen lover all his life, and has had the car for 23 years.
“They’re such a really cool Volkswagen because it’s different than every other one they ever produced,” he said. “This one was actually a sports car.”
There aren’t many cars like his around anymore, Schwabenbauer said.
The body style was used from 1975 to 1982 and then Volkswagen went to a different design.
“This is a little more rare,” he said.
An automotive technician at St. Albert Dodge, the local driver said the more he works on his car and the better he knows his car, the more confident he is on the track.
And like Schwabenbauer, most of the Eurasia Cup competitors can be found both behind the wheel and also under the hood.
“I’d say probably 85 to 90 per cent of the guys out there do work on their own car,” he said.
Schwabenbauer placed fifth in the race last year, and this year he’s made some modifications to the Scirocco to give him more speed.
“This year, I actually did a little modification to my transmission, and I made a taller fifth gear because last year I was doing 260 (kilometres per hour) down the straightaway and it just wasn’t enough,” he said.
He’s hoping that the transmission work will get him to 280 or even 300 km/h on the straightaway this year.
At the race, Schwabenbauer and his crew will make any necessary adjustments to the car after the practice and qualifying rounds, but major work like the transmission modification happens before they get to the track.
“You go out, you test it and you make little changes,” he said. “You don’t want to do drastic changes.”
Schwabenbauer’s pit crew is a family unit that includes his wife Kim, brother Michael and co-worker Michael Henry.
The two Schwabenbauer brothers started M+M Racing in 1996, ice racing with the Northern Alberta Sports Car Club.
“We did that very competitively for many years and won many championships together,” Schwabenbauer said.
The practice session for the Eurasia Cup GT Invitational runs Friday, July 20 at 8:15 a.m. and qualifying happens at 5 p.m. that day. Drivers will start their engines for the race at 5:55 p.m. on Saturday, July 21.
