By: Motoring Staff
Johannesburg - Over the past few years we’ve reported on South African teenager Kelvin van der Linde’s successes in international motorsport, but now his younger brother Sheldon is following in his footsteps.
Aged just 16, Sheldon has secured a full-time seat in the 2016 Audi Sport TT Cup - a one-make series which acts as a support race to the German Touring Car Championship.
Heroic finale for Extreme series
The Johannesburg-based youngster, who won back-to-back Engen Polo Cup Championships in 2014 and 2015 on local soil, was selected by Audi Sport to fill one of 20 seats in the TT Cup series after his performance at a driver scouting event held in Italy late in 2015.
The Audi Sport TT Cup features five races in Germany, as well as one each at Zandvoort in Holland and the Budapest Grand Prix circuit in Hungary.
Each race features two 30-minute heats, in which a field of identical Audi TT race cars piloted by up-and-coming young drivers from around the world will battle for honours on the prestigious global motorsport stage.
All cars are prepared by quattro GmbH in Germany to ensure complete fairness in the series.
‘PUSH TO PASS’
The TT Cup car weighs 1125kg and produces 228kW from a two-litre turbo engine driving the front wheels through a six-speed paddle-shift transmission.
An extra burst of 22kW is available via a ‘push-to-pass’ button on the steering wheel, but the feature is limited to a set amount of activations per heat. An LED light in the car’s rear window indicates how many power boosts a driver has left.
Sheldon is a third-generation South African champion, following his father Shaun, who won the SA Touring Car Championship for BMW in 1994, and grandfather Hennie who won three national saloon-car championships in the 1980s.
Sheldon’s uncle Etienne is also a former single-seater star who won national championships in karting, Formula Vee and Formula GTi. - Star Motoring
2016 AUDI SPORT TT CUP CALENDAR
May 6-8: Hockenheim
May 26-29: Nurburgring
June 24-26: Norisring
July 15-17: Zandvoort
Sept 9-11: Nürburgring
Sept 23-25: Budapest