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Your track car is no fun in the garage. Sure, maybe you give it a celebratory detail job after a weekend of hard lapping, but the place where you want your track car to excel is on track. And it can’t do that if it’s broken, or acting suspicious, or constantly being a hassle.
Dale Lomas knows what it takes to keep cars on track day after day. He’s one of the principals of Rent4Ring, a track car rental shop located at the world famous Nürburgring Nordschleife. “If my track cars aren’t on track,” he tells us, “I don’t pay my mortgage that month.”
Lomas let us poke around his shop and showed us a few tricks his crew uses to make sure their cars stay on track, safely, lap after lap.
1. Pick the right car.
“This is always a tough decision for individuals because people want to drive what they want to drive,” Lomas explains, “but for us, we need to start with cars that are inherently tough enough to build from.”
For the Rent4Ring crew, they have another built-in easy button in the form of the Lomas’ institutional knowledge. “Having some experience on the car development side of things,” Lomas continues, “I know that there’s some Easter eggs hiding in the spec sheets. Things like bigger brakes for German market models, or larger radiators for units bound for the Middle East desert.”
And cooling particularly is a huge factor for the rental vehicles because, let’s be honest, customers are not always great on watching gauges. So Rent4Ring picks cars for their rental fleet with standard or available overkill cooling systems so that’s never a worry.
While not many cars sold stateside have secret Autobahn packages, we do have some available hot-weather and extreme-duty packages as well as a robust aftermarket eager to supply heavy-duty cooling components. Some research up front regarding the available heat mitigation if often time well spent.
A factor that significantly contributes to that heat: horsepower. One of the byproducts of big power is big heat, and the more power an engine makes, the more heat you’ll need to manage.
The battle starts with choosing the right car. Rent4Ring is transitioning to a fleet of Minis and four-cylinder Supras based on research that shows both cars…
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