The 2011 World Time Attack Challenge is set to take place from August 4th to 6th at the Eastern Creek Raceway in Sydney, Australia. Japanese tuners Revolution and Panspeed are entered in the fastest class of this championship event with Mazda RX-7s. The cars and parts were shipped at the end of June and are now awaiting staff to come to Australia at the end of July. We asked both tuners about their eagerness to compete in this event and, of course, their cars.

Mr. Tetsuhiro Sato, Panspeed
"We took 5th place overall and 2nd place in the FR class at Eastern last year. Our target is to get a better result this time out than we did then. The Panspeed RX-7 has had only minor modifications over last year's challenger, in areas such as the suspension system and transmission. I think it is important to improve traction in our aim to better our lap times. As he did last year, professional racing driver Kota Sasaki will pilot the car, and I think it'll be possible to improve our lap times through the accumulation of set-up knowledge gained at last year's event. On the other hand, when I looked at the entrants' list in the Pro-class, there are many high-powered 4WD cars such as the Evo and GT-R, and this will make it more difficult for us to improve our ranking at this upcoming event. However, we'll do our best and will be giving a 100% effort to show our true performance. You can count on it!"

Mr. Takashi Aoki, Revolution
"Naturally our goal is to take victory. We have modified the suspension system, powertrain and other areas of our TA-2 (Time Attack No. 2) RX-7 in order to achieve this goal. Our development work has focused primarily on improving the aerodynamics at the rear of the car. As we haven't yet got any data from Eastern Creek Raceway, we'll be setting up the car after we arrive at the venue. However, I'm not worried as we've got Mitsuhiro Kinoshita behind the wheel, a driver with hugely varied experience. According to what I've heard, the track is very rough and quite bumpy, so we'll be targeting a balance between the car's ride height and aerodynamics. Out target lap time is in the 1'27" - 1'28" range. I believe this target sets us among the top times as the best time from last year was a 1'30". I'd like to take a moment to thank all our sponsors. As holders of the top time at Tsukuba we will be doing our very best. Please come and see our runs, we'll be throwing our weight around."