For many South African racing fans, the heyday of the sport was the early 1990s. Not only were there huge fields of competitors, but rivalry among manufacturers, in this case BMW and Opel, spawned two of SA’s most iconic performance/racecars: the 325iS and GSI 16 S “Superboss”.
These unique-to-SA racecars, driven by famous names such as the late, great Tony Viana, CAR‘s resident track-tester Deon Joubert, Grant McLeery and multiple champ Mike Briggs, were the envy of every petrolhead. And they are still highly sought after today.
Manufacturer support for local racing has dwindled to sad levels of late. Even the recently launched GTC formula has only managed to garner the support of, essentially, two manufacturing groups: BMW and Volkswagen/Audi.
We enlisted the services of a budding young designer, Rudi Stadler, to create updated versions of iconic SA racecars. We started with the modern versions of those classic racecars mentioned above, but in period livery. Now, if we can just convince the automakers to return to circuit racing, we may just create a whole new generation of racing fans…
You can view more of Stadler’s creativity, including a Mazda MX-5 inspired by CAR‘s Project MX-5, on the Instagram account for his design works: Rooster Creative.
