World of Ruf Invitational Autocross
August 31/September 1, 1998

The Garage Queen Makes it to the Track

Wayne's immaculate 1992 NSX finally makes it to the race track!

Picking up from the Buttonwillow Enduro last week.....

Anyways, Wayne and I got invited to go to the wedding reception of Luis and Estonia Ruf.  Ruf is the world's smallest car manufacturer, and they build about 25 cars a year.  They are luxurious, handle great, and are among the fastest street legal cars that you can buy.  Luis and Estonia got married earlier in Germany, but they decided to also have a wedding reception in Minnesota organized by Frank Beddor.  Frank works with Bill Pound to organize the June Virginia City Hill Climb events, and so we got asked if we would like to go to Brainerd, Minnesota for a wedding reception.  Luis Ruf rented out the entire Brainerd International Raceway for two days, and it was free track time to any of his guests that wanted to attend. 

The Newlyweds

Since Brainerd has about a 1.2 mile long front straightaway, Wayne, Dagmar and I said "What the heck, let's go to Brainerd for a little vacation and some track time".   Normally we would ship my NSX, but 3 days after this event is the Los Angeles Street Race, and we would not have enough time to ship my car back via transporter and get it prepared for the race.  We decided to ship Wayne's 944 Turbo instead, except he blew up the head gasket at Buttonwillow the night before we were to ship it to Brainerd.   Now the problem is that we can't use my car, Wayne's 944 Turbo is blowing out huge clouds of white smoke, and we already paid for the transporter and plane tickets to get to Brainerd.  I leaned on him a little to just ship his NSX, since he has five point harnesses in it already.  Wayne was going ballastic, as his NSX doesn't have a single scratch on it, and he knows if it goes to the race track, we will beat the shit out of it and probably spin it into the gravel pits or, worse yet, into a wall.   But, luckily for us, as the transporter was driving into Huntington Beach to pickup a car, Wayne relented and we shipped the garage queen to Minnesota.

Amir's F40 and Steve's F355

The transporter went to Perris Lake and picked up Bill Pound's girl friend's(Jane Reis) beautiful Ferrari Dino, then went to Northern California to pickup Amir's F40, Steve's F355, Ori's modified Viper, and Terry's 308.  So basically about three quarters of a million dollars worth of cars in the enclosed transporter.  As the cars were being lowered off the transporter, Amir looked at the brakes rotors on Wayne's NSX, and laughed and said, "look at those itty bitty brake rotors on your car".  Acura, do you get the hint???

1974 Ferrari Dino

Of course we were booked for Northwest Airlines, right on the first day of their strike.  What a pain in the ass to get all that stuff changed.  Instead of flying into Minneapolis and then puddle jumping into Brainerd, we have to drive a rental car from Minneapolis to Brainerd, since Northwest has most of the flights into Brainerd, and Northwest is on strike.  Northwest sounds like a monopoly that acts like a monopoly, unlike a certain software company that "appears" to be a monopoly to its enemies, but that certain software company DECREASES prices and INCREASES output, which is the exact opposite of traditional monopolistic behavior.   Remember that when you get pulled into cocktail conversations about DOJ regulation in the software industry.  Get those DOJ bastards to pick on the airlines for stranding 100,000+ people that become unproductive sitting around a damn airport or missing their final destination due to restricting output. 

Ori's Viper with slicks

Okay, so we are at Brainerd, and this is this guy that Luis Ruf brought from Germany named Wolfgang Weber.  Sounds like a racer dude, doesn't it?   Anyways, he is an ex-rally champion, so he out there in a 1988 Ruf destroying the tires.  I mean he is coming out of turns full opposite lock, screeching the tires, and putting on a big time show of how to have fun in a Ruf (but not necessary the fastest way around the track).  Everyone gets at least one ride as a passenger in his car, and it is pretty fun seeing car control from a rally driver.

Activity in the Ruf garage.  Four Ruf machines were at this event.

We had a couple of nice dinners that were organized by Luis Ruf and Frank Beddor.  They seem to do everything first class.  At the final dinner of the trip, Luis raffled off TWELVE round trip tickets to Germany to attend the Ruf Driving School in 1999 at no cost.  Only the drivers were eligible for the drawing, figuring 60 drivers are at the dinner, we all had a 1 in 5 chance of getting a free trip to Germany.  Wayne, that lucky bastard, scored on one of those of trips, so it looks like we will be going to the Autobahn next year......

Ferrari F40 Limo

Frank Beddor, being a Ruf guy, always likes to get his digs in on the Ferrari guys like Amir and Bill Pound.  So Frank rented an F40 limo for the two day track event, and the limo driver drove everyone around the track.

Blasting into the turn before the long straightaway

In the time trial event, out of 77 cars entered in the event, I had the 15th fastest time at 1:59.89, using Wayne's car with street tires on it.  Wayne was 17th at 2:01.30, probably because he was scared of wrecking his car(and he did go off the track during one of his time trial laps, but suffered no damage).  I wasn't afraid of wrecking the car because, hey, so what, it ain't my car!!   As for top speed on the straightaway, Wayne had 152 mph on the radar gun, and I had 140 mph, which I think is an error, because I am pretty sure I was pushing the car harder than Wayne, so maybe they got the car numbers mixed up(we had different numbers for each driver)..  Anyways, Best time of the day was by Steve Beddor at 1:42.13, with a top speed of 164 mph at the end of the straightaway in a Ruf CTR 2 Sport, which is really booking fast for a streetable, comfortable car. 2nd fastest time of the day was by David Beddor, also in a Ruf CTR2 Sport, in 1:46.33 and 161 mph top speed.   3rd was Kim Crumb at 1:46.67 and 151 mph, running a Viper GTS.  Next year, we will try to bring my car with the Supercharger, and see if we can gain some ground on the Rufs and Vipers.  I doubt we can beat them, as they have WAY more power and have good drivers behind the wheel, but we should be able to drop our lap times and increase our top speed significantly with the Supercharger....