Just a lekker little story behind 8V Performance.

In 2005 Craig Marais decided to shock the world going over from Opel to Vw. He decided to live up to the goods flowing in his veins (track racing) and sell the Opel TS to buy a old dodgy 10k mk1. I built him a decent 1.8 engine with sidies that dominated all the hill climbs, gymkhanas, track days and just for the fun it also ran 15.0 at tarlton. Soon after the car was a fully built vw Challenge spec mk1. We had to d- tune to fit the rules and the budget only allowed us on a class B car.

Pitching up for race no1
We had no piggy back…. no trailer
The car had plates so we decided to rock up in the car itself with all the spares and tools inside. Looking around we felt little like the ugly duckling. We had to run the rookie tape on the car as per first 4 race rules at the time. We decided to call ourselves 8Valve Performance since everyone called me mr 8valve at the time due to street racing.

First race went down so brilliant that we got asked to remove the rookie tape and number plates as it was clearly no good idea for tv coverage. Engine got stripped twice that year to ensure we are not cheating. 
Personally I knew I had the perfect man behind the wheel making me look like some kind of genius engine builder. The results for that year was first in class. 2nd overall due to some political arguments we just didn’t want to get involved in. ? 
Even got offered a bribe not to fight the matter.
The best of all we were fully satisfied to know the story of the ugly duckling does exist.

A very long story short, this is what put us on the map when it came to circuit racing.