Vauxhall Corsa VXR Race Preparation

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By John Thorne, Team Principal – Thorney Motorsport – Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:00

In 2008, Thorney Motorsport’s Corsa VXR registered fastest laps at all race events, 6 overall race wins, and placed 2nd in the overall championship.

Here at Thorney Motorsport we have an excellent relationship with Vauxhall, as we are the only tuning company with Approved Vauxhall Repair status, we’ve been fortunate enough to produce an Corsa VXR race car, supplied by Vauxhall, for the purposes of testing and development. This has allowed us to develop a range of tuning products for the car and enhance these to the level of race preparation.

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Building a race car is a very lengthy proccess, costing a lot of time, money and effort, however the more of this we spend on the car the better quality of racing we provide. We have a lot of experience with Vauxhall’s doing a lot of research and development on them. In ordered to get our race cars to winning standard the following things need to be addressed.

  • Reduce weight. The Corsa VXR weighs 1225Kg in standard trim, and can lose a huge amount of weight from its chassis. Depending on race series regulations lose all the peripheral toys and get it down to a bare chassis.
  • Brakes. Standard brakes are poor and certainly not up to track spec let alone race so replace with AP Racing 6 pot fronts and 4 pot rears with larger grooved disks.
  • Suspension. Replace for a complete Nitron coil over kit front and rear. The rear suspension towers will need re-inforcement.
  • Safety. Full 8 point cages are now available from Safety Devices and bolt straight in.
  • Power. FullThorney Motorsport Race exhausts (bore dependant on what turbo charger you run), turbo changes, delete the AMM etc etc, the list is endless but there are a lot of things you can ignore as we know they don’t work. Our race VXT has the same basic engine (older version with a few changes but its basically the same) and we run over 280 bhp from that so power is not an issue.

Our race cars have thier own unique colour scheme of black and green. These colours are printed on everything we produce. Below is the process we go through to give our Corsa VXR race car our black and green colour scheme.

Vinyl_4.JPG Race Car Livery Vinyl_1_2.JPG Race Car Livery Vinyl_5.JPG Race Car Livery Vinyl_3_1.JPG Race Car Livery

We start off with a basic Corsa VXR and completely strip it out to its bare shell, removing everything little uneeded extra weight. Truth be told, the lighter the car is the quicker the car is. Once the car is stripped out all of the race interior can be applied.

DSC01185.JPG Interior Before Stripping DSC01192.JPG Interior Stripped Out DSC01198.JPG Interior After Stripping DSC01201.JPG Interior After Stripping

TMS is proud to offer help and support for any race team preparing their own car complete with potential parts sponsorship deals should they be applicable. We also offer a complete turnkey solution for race preparation and an Astra VXR built to complete race spec with 300bhp+ and fully adjustable race suspension can be achieved from £31,000 (plus VAT).
Milltek_Exhaust_Corsa_SRI.jpg Full Race Exhaust System AP_Disks.jpg AP Big Brake Kit NTRon_1.jpg Full Coilover Kit Roll_Cage.jpg Full Roll Cage

We are currently involved in several projects for the Astra VXR for the Dunlop SportMax series so welcome any approaches to expand our role in this new series.

For full technical details on the Dunlop SportMaxx series please click to our ‘Racing’ section of the website

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