Hey guys,
I'm Steve Millen's son Kyle. We are the other New Zealanders racing our GT. We actually competed in a multi-day tarmac rally event. The event was covered by Road And Track magazine with a focus on our team, so keep an eye out for it. I think it comes out around March. For 5 days we put that car through absolute misery. Racing in Monsoon like conditions around a famous New Zealand race-track "Pukekohe" (actual pronunciation is poo-ka-ko-ee.) And also having stages that were beautifully clear and warm. It was a complete blast. And the car did a tremendous job.
We actually built the car in our Southern California shop "Stillen." We made a custom chromoly roll-cage, custom muffler delete X-pipe with billet aluminum clamps and a ceramic coated finish. Cat delete mid-pipes and of course a smaller pulley with some special tuning. We are the sole-distributors of AP racing in North America so of course we put on our AP racing big brake kit. As well as an AP Racing high-performance clutch. We only had about 3 months to build the car and we only worked on it on nights and weekends. We took ownership of it in early June and shipped it to New Zealand in the middle of August. The car was black when we got it so we repainted it a special House of Kolors Orange with some anthrocite racing stripes down the center. We also used the optional BBS wheels but before they were mounted we painted them anthrocite gray to match the stripes.
Overall the car ran perfectly. We didn't have any major issues. We ran into a little problem with brake fade but once we tossed out the crappy Motul 600 fluid and replaced it with the Castrol 1000 fluid we never had another problem. We ended up finishing third in our class and I think 18th overall. Which wasn't bad considering those other 17 cars were all wheel drive and the first two days consisted of torrential downpours on roads covered with gravel (sometimes we would go through an entire stage without ANY traction.) When we went to the Pukekohe race track we were literally racing in a monsoon...That didn't stop us from flying by Porsches and all the other competition at well over 160 MPH...This was the only part of the rally that did not have a speed limit. Every other part had a speed limit of 130 MPH (200 KMH) which we were constantly running up against.
It was a lot of fun and the car is actually on its way home as I type this. We are going to go through it again, give it more power and rework a few things. We definitely plan on competing again this year and this time we want to get some good grippy tires instead of the factory tires we raced on this year. As you can imagine, they would warm up and wear out pretty quickly.
Here is a link to the actual event and the second link is a bunch of pictures of our car.
http://www.targa.co.nz/index.aspx
http://www.groundsky.co.nz/
to view the pictures click on "DUNLOP Targa NZ 2006"
Click on "View the CD online"
and look for car #907 (6th row from the left 12th listing down.)