2017 AMEO CUP PREVIEW

Sirish Vissa on the development of the new 2017 Volkswagen Ameo Cup car

Sirish Vissa divulges as well as stays mum on the

details of VW India's forthcoming Ameo Cup

“IT IS THE QUICKEST touring car that we have made and hopefully it may also be the quickest one in India.” A highly enthusiastic Sirish Vissa relates to us as he and his Volkswagen Motorsport India team gear up for the 2017 season of the new Ameo Cup. After a couple of seasons with the Vento, Volkswagen has decided to employ their latest sub-4 metre sedan Ameo for the new season.

VW has taken mighty effort in developing the new car, especially with the chassis. While they are tight-lipped on the powertrain front, Sirish claims that their car is nearly two seconds faster than the Vento after their first round of testing at the Buddh International Circuit. The new Ameo Cup car is rumoured to get a larger engine and a new gearbox, but details are scarce at this moment. What we do know is that the new engine will have a Motec ECU, which is slightly more expensive. In the previous season, the company suffered two blown engines at the BIC due to poor fuel quality. These new ECUs will take care of this issue and will be beneficial in the long run.

Considering the company’s withdrawal from the WRC programme as well as Audi’s retirement from endurance racing, the investment into the new programme is considerably high. The reason for this is the company’s mandate to allow the growth of customer sport, and one of the most successful ones around the world is the one that the Indian division carries out. The new power unit is designed for reliability for the next four seasons of racing, irrespective of the body shells the company decides to adopt for the future.

As the Ameo’s wheelbase is quite similar to that of the Polo, VW has had to work on the suspension setup for the revised wheelbase, while the components remain the same. The Polo R Cup car had good cornering abilities, especially quick during turn-ins. The succeeding Vento was extremely stable mid-corner due to its larger wheelbase. While testing the Ameo Cup car, VW found it to be a bit too twitchy, unsettling the balance of the car during corner entry as well as in the fast corners. Hence, they had to design a proper aerofoil creating more downforce and helping the car to bear both aforementioned qualities of the Polo and Vento. The rear wing is manually adjustable but it remains to be seen whether each driver can tweak it to his liking or if it will remain the same for all.

While the Ameo is currently running the 2016 MRF rubber, there are tyre tests scheduled at the MMRT in Chennai as the bulk of the championship takes place there. They will be carrying out tests for nearly 30 different compounds from MRF and the final tyre choice will only be announced when the car is launched.

This all-Indian developed car will make its race debut mid-2017 and Sirish hopes that they will have a strong grid of nearly 24 cars for the season. The testing has been carried out by their 2014 Polo R Cup champion Karthik Tharani adding to the all-Indian effort. There is a bump of `50,000 for the drive for participants, which in the grand scheme of things is not too much. The Ameo Cup will have four rounds which will most probably run on all three circuits in the country.

While the Ameo Cup car is on its way to being the country's quickest touring car, VW Motorsport India is also confident of their ITC-spec Vento’s progress. “The project is still under development. With the new rules favouring newer generation of cars we are in a much better position than last year. The allowance of turbos and sequential gearbox (like the ones run on the R2 rally Polos) will make the Vento a much better unit for 2017. Hence we are still optimistic of the project,” said Vissa. ⌧