To get straight to the nuts and bolts of it, as it were, the Cape car community lives to haal uit en wys, as it is said. What that means is bringing your motor to the track and pitting your power against others, and no one is to be underestimated.
The Saldanha Top End Drags, organized by West Coast Racing’s Lawton van Oordt and Grant Steenvel for over two decades now, is one of those place. It’s not a dash to the 400 metre line. Rather, a top speed reached over a good 800m, when a car really gets to feel it’s cohesion. In other words, if there’s something not quite right, your car will show it.
This year saw an important line in the sand crossed. Well, less on the sand than on the well worn tarmac of Saldanha Airstrip. Since the inception of this event is has only been the two-wheel machines that pass that magic 300km/h barrier, with Garion Slamet on his Suzuki Hayabusa last year clocking 310km/h over the line but still a far cry from his 2020 record of 322.5km/h.
This year, on September 6 at the Saldanha Airstrip in Vredenburg, Jerome Michaels registered a sizzling 315.49km/h in his Audi TT RS, obviously tweaked to the max to achieve that kind of top end performance.
The crowds went wild. For the first time ever the four-wheel performance outstripped the two-wheelers, with the fastest bike of the day ridden by Sand Roux at 313km/h.
Jerome, from Mitchell’s Plain, says: “I have done tweaks here and there, the main power boosters are the precision turbo, three boost levels, and an updated transmission file in the TCU. The 315km/h I did at 2.9 boost, which is not even maximum.”
This is the fourth time in a row Jerome has won fastest of the day. Those dominant GT-Rs are getting unseated. “I’ve had one, but you have you spend triple what you spend on a TT to get the same performance. The weight is the thing. At the moment, the second fastest of the day was 285km/h but now the Joburg guys when they come will give me a run for it,” reckons Jerome.
While short of the 349.1km/h track record, his performance unseats Jaleel Firferey’s run of winning three Saldanha’s in a row in his six-cylinder BMW140i.
There seems to be a new generation of go-fast guys emerging, as there were the years when this event was dominated by local heroes such as the late Shaheen ‘Suspect’ Barmania as well as the Nissan monsters brought in from Joburg builders.
Building up to the event, we had the likes of Maistry Motorsport and CPI Performace Innovation hyping the day into a GTR rivalry of sorts, both eyeing that 300km/h mark. Nivan Maistry managed a 285.45km/h. Close but no cigar.
Grant speaks about the challenges of staging an event like this: “The main idea is to get the guys off the street and onto the track.”
With an event like this, the crowd is large and the atmosphere charged, yet the timing and track operations worked smoothly through the day.
Many of the faster cars on the day opted for solo runs. While this may not be ideal for fans, it’s better for drivers in top-end racing. After all, it’s not about who is first over the line, but about who is going the fastest over that line. Solo runs avoid the distraction of another car on track.
Also, at these high speeds, anything can happen so it’s probably best not to have another car in the vicinity should things go south.
The 2025 event reaffirms Saldanha’s status as one of the premier top-end venues in South Africa and the fact that speeds over 300 km/h are being achieved in multiple classes shows both vehicle performance and tuning, as well as driver skill, have kept advancing. The bar has been raised high, way high.