South African team Zoo Racing had entered two cars in the 2014 African 6 Hour, held in Phakisa International Raceway, not far away from Johannesburg, a Pilbeam MP98 and the brand new Pilbeam MP100, both cars being of course LMP2s. The MP100 is fitted with the turbocharged Ford Duratec 2 litres developped  by Mountune, a British company. However, neither the MP98 nor the MP100 has been racing in the African 6 Hour.

Greg Mills, Zoo Racing owner and driver, has kindly explained us the reasons of this withdrawal.

Greg Mills : “Unfortunately we missed the six hour due to running out of time to race-prepare the car, given clutch problems which caused us to lose five days of in the week before the event. As a result we could obviously not take a car which had not turned a wheel by the Friday to a race, especially an endurance event. Thus we elected to test the car (with its original bodywork) in Johannesburg not least since we had a Mountune engineer (for the two-litre turbo powerplant) out for the weekend and we would have made no use of his time if we had instead raced the smaller MP98 in Welkom.

As it turned out, we encountered myriad small problems during the test, which would have made racing pointless. These are relatively simple to fix, but not during a race! The car and engine, however, performed well overall, though the Saturday test was curtailed by a broken throttle-cable.

We will now test extensively while the new body is being finalised to iron out any other problems, before looking to race again in July.”

During the test, the Pilbeam MP100 was driven on the circuit of Zwartkops by Greg Mills himself and by Jaki Scheckter, son of Ian Scheckter, a former Formula One driver, and nephew of Jody Scheckter, 1979 Formula One World Champion.