English: ‘Arrive-and-drive!’
This is our DNA, racing is in our blood. We take you back in time, with stories from the past. Back to our roots! A journey along the circuits, the 24h races and the special moments. Today, we still work passionately on our customers’ race cars. And that passion to get the most, and secretly a bit more, out of a race car will always remain. It’s what we’re good at.
With special thanks to Peter Vader (Text & Photos)
Sporting spirit!
Sportsmanship goes hand-in-hand with Porsche and Lammertink. It is both their passion! In car land, sportiness stands for speed and Lammertink’s team knows how to bring that in. At least, for those who like it. Because all those restoration jobs done perfectly in Enter have their origins partly on the racetrack. There, speed and skill are required when it comes to keeping a racing car on the road. Otherwise, a customer will no longer enjoy the racing game. Needless to say, the preparation must be technically perfect. That is where the link with restoration projects lies. Once you master those two things, you can complete what Lammertink Racing did years ago: preparing and supervising a Porsche 911 during a race weekend of the (Dutch) Supercar Challenge. The racing series in the Benelux, which let amateur drivers race for a weekend at circuits such as Zandvoort (NL), Zolder (B), Spa-Francorchamps (B) and the Nürburgring (D).
‘Arrive and drive’
Edwin Lammertink fulfilled the concept of arrive-and-drive perfectly. The drivers who used Lammertink Racing’s services were often entrepreneurs or businessmen, who had little time left during the week because of their business concerns. But nevertheless, they wanted to race. Preferably with a special car too. So many knocked on Enter’s door to conclude a deal for a whole season racing a Porsche in the Supercar Challenge championship. In that racing series, the principle was that fun should take precedence over performance. It worked pretty well in the early 2000s, but as the years progressed, the cars and teams became more and more professional. And the amateur drivers developed into skilled professionals. Lammertink Racing just went along with that flow. The Porsches became faster and faster and the weekends more intense. Once you get going with driven people, you can never prevent, in this case, ’the racing’ from developing to higher levels. That was also visible on the track.
The Lammertink racing cars
The Lammertink Porsches clearly stood out among the big, fat GTs and touring cars with lots of horsepower on board. The colour schemes were often allied to those of Porsche’s factory race cars of the past. Think Rothmans and Martini. So with the retro trend that was gaining momentum in those days, Lammertink was at the forefront. But free creativity was also given a chance. One gentleman-driver drove a white Porsche with a series of roses on the side of the car. And yet that didn’t seem too sweet. The other was a fruit dealer, so there on his banana-yellow Porsche, apples, oranges and bananas appeared on his car. It might all sound a bit banal, but when you saw it driving around the track, it was ‘mind blowing’! Taking the crown was a very fierce (read powerful) Porsche 997 RSR Turbo. With the base colour white, the bodywork was painted with red and blue signal stripes. It was a so-called ‘psychedelic’ colour scheme, which a Porsche 917 once raced around with at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But in the case of that ‘Hippie’ Porsche 917-021, which finished second overall in 1970, the colours were blue and green. With the Lammertink ‘psychedelic’ RSR, it was the fresh red-white-and-blue colours of the Dutch tricolour that formed the basis. Cool! The Lammertink Porsches became a household name in the Supercar Challenge scene, not least due to their appearance.
Porsche Passion
Anyway, what is beautiful does not have to be fast. So in Enter, they soon moved on to the order of the day. That was preparing Porsches to race them. The passion for technology, was present in Edwin Lammertink from an early age. He tinkered with anything and everything and preferred to live under a bonnet rather than in a school bench. As long as it had wheels. Then he was also introduced to motor racing. Then you know immediately what time it is. And not unexpectedly, his passion turned out to be quite contagious. In the workshops of his ever-expanding premises on the Vonderweg in Enter, the lights were increasingly on until the late (or early) hours. It was so contagious that the team of employees could be found at the racetracks almost every weekend of the racing season (March to October) in the years from 2005 to 2015. We will tell more about it in this news section. But every weekend at the track, of course no horse can keep that up. And so the decision was made to restore (even more). And with that, we arrived in 2023. Fortunately, the passion for Porsche was not lost in Enter. That would be a waste of all that know-how and skill. But current restoration is a different discipline from racing. Less fast, no less intensive. The goal now is to deliver unprecedented craftsmanship, because the slogan must be lived up to again and again: Lammertink, specialised in Porsche! (Text: Peter Vader)
