So SEMA is a lot of things, besides all the meetings and walking and looking for great new products. Remus, the largest European exhaust manufacturer, held it’s second annual Remus Cup competition, at SEMA this year.
Wow, was the competition heated. I should first premise that last year Mike and I (ModBargains) came in a dead heat tie for first with Bimmerspeed, and after 3 tie breakers on a Daytona USA machine, Bimmerspeed took first. So this year we definitly wanted to win the cup.
This year I came in on my own, to represent ModBargains, and to my surprise there were a total of 24 racer entrants; the field grew quite a bit since the year before. This year, Remus had 12 racers from Japan come in representing various tuner shops, Bimmerspeed was back with Ryan and John (each of them race instructors who are amazing and their recent race car just came in first as well, John especially has been a pro driver for many years winning for bimmerworld). There were a couple of American representatives, and of course they had some racers from Austria and Germany there too.
Racing is done in a buddy system and I was paired up with the CEO of Remus, Bernd (amazing person and racer), soon we were called the ‘CEO’ team lol. Anyway last year it was a point system for positions so we thought that might be how this year was scored.
However, this year was they wouldn’t tell us anything about how the point system would go. So during practice I just went all out, but I had no idea how the lap times were. We were just told to compete as hard as you can. Okay, no problem. Qualifying rounds quickly came up, and I had one horrible lap where I got slammed into the wall (having the wall land on me, luckily I got some got laps in after that). Turned out I was able to get a nice grid position during the race, and it proved to be vital as that allowed me to get in a few clean laps with no one to interfere with my driving. Well as it turned out, the combined best lap times were taken for the teams including review of overall consistency across the board.
Much to my surprise, I beat out second place by only a tenth of a second allowing me to take home the trophy for ModBargains. Right on my heels, Japan tuners took second and third. Bimmerspeed actually posted some of the best times, but on race laps they ended up fighting the pack harder then ever which affected their consistancy. So for this next year the Cup stays here at ModBargains! The Remus race was an honor and a great way to meet fellow shops, racers and tuners out on the race track. I’m really looking forward to defending our title next year, but I know competition will be tough! Thank you to Remus for putting on such a great event and much respect to everyone there. This 1st place win was really a great surprise to me, and Remus provided an amazing excursion from the norm of SEMA.
-Ron Hay
Co-Founder ModBargains/ ModAuto