Matteo Gualandi - MINI

Italian Time Attack Series

My involvement started in 2013 with the first Time Attack event in Italy, our MINI Cooper GP was a road car prepared for the track but from year to year it has continued to evolve until 2017 where we hit the track with 500hp, a sequential gearbox and carbon fiber body panels. Time Attack is a good advertisement for my company GP garage as it brings us work from customers who race in the series and also allows us to experiment with new solutions to bring to the market for that clientele. This kind of competition allows us to show what we do as tuners as there are no constraints to create new evolutions on the cars. Quite often they ask me why we do not run in the Mini Challenge series, I reply by saying that we could not showcase our products by running in a one-make series; therefore we limit ourselves to being only their suppliers. My history in the world of motorsport began in 1989 with the first races in the Italian minicross championship which I ran until 2006 with the European supermotard championship. From 2007 I moved over to cars and ran in rallies and hillclimbs. Since 2009, however, with the opening of GP Garage I started to go to tracks for track days with my MINI. But it was 2013 before I started to compete properly with the MINI.

2018 sees us begin a new adventure in the Italian Time Attack series, competing with a entirely new MINI and a new platform to us, the R56 Turbo car. After many years our development of the R53 Rotrex platform had come to an end and we wanted to experiment with new things on this turbo-charged platform and develop new parts for the many R56 owners over the World.

Matteo Gualandi is the owner of GPgarage in Verona, Italy. He will continue to compete in the 2018 Italian Time Attack series. His sponsors for 2018 will be Competition clutch, ecumaster, FRW, ACME, NTP Bilstein, Team Dynamics.

He can be reached at info@gpgarage.it