Five Minutes with Lars Wolfe

We took a few minutes to sit down with our good friend, Lars Wolfe, and talk about his latest project, the Multi-purpose racer.  Also known as “Opy”, the car is a Nissan Juke, modified only with safety equipment required to be legal in any series he wants to race in, otherwise the car is bone stock.

Here’s a bit about Lars, and the Project in his own words:

Hi my name is Lars Wolf and I have been given an opportunity to work with My Life at Speed and share with you my new project: The Multi-purpose Racer.

I live in Danville California, married, and father of two. I’ve been a mechanic for over 20 years and a race car mechanic and driver for about 10 years but i have been interested in cars and anything mechanical for many more years than that. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in everything from private garages all the way up to major manufacturers and race teams. I’ve worked on cutting edge modern day race cars and vintage NASCAR, Trans-Am and IMSA cars.

With some of the connections I made during that time, along with their help and experience, I decided to build, drive, and run my own race team. After years of successfully representing many sponsors, both big and small, I was forced to take a step back from racing and re-invent myself so I can keep doing what I truly love to do, which is race!

With this project I wanted to do something exciting, informational and much different that what I had previously done or seen.  After months of research and collaboration with many friends and mentors that have helped to guide me along my path, I created this project – “The Multi-Purpose Racer”.  This project will show how one car can go between many different types of racing.  From off-road gravel stage rally, tarmac road-racing, time attack, drift, and even drag racing.  In this series, you’ll be able to follow the car’s transformation, as well as the team and drivers ability to adapt to new venues and conditions.  You’ll also see all the challenges we face along the way.

The plan is to make this a three-year project with the first year focusing more on the basic things needed to go racing, the events themselves, and the safety equipment of the car. Later on we will start focusing on the performance development of the car and how to make it, and myself, both faster and more reliable. The 2015 schedule will consist of one stage rally (Rally America’s Oregon Trails Rally) one road race (US Touring Car event at Laguna Seca) ,and one time attack event (Willow Springs in October) with, hopefully, an opportunity to go to the 25 hours of Thunderhill. Once the 2015 season has ended we will regroup and gear up to be faster and more competitive and plan to compete in more races during the 2016 calendar year.

The car I’ve chosen for this project is a 2012 Nissan Juke. You may ask yourself, “why the Nissan Juke”?  I studied many different vehicles and vehicle platforms and searched for what I thought would be the best car to move across many different types of racing and the Nissan Juke seems to fit all the categories very well.  As the series moves along, I’ll do my best to explain this in further detail. So I hope you will join me for the next several installments here on My Life at Speed, showing you the process which we hope will take this mild-mannered streetcar to a full-blown race car.