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My name is Olaf Manthey,
and I'm the owner of the Manthey Racing team.
We use exclusively Porsche race and road cars.
I started out in motorsports in 1974, at the age of 18.
The first time I felt the real excitement of racing was when I was about 12,
and my dad took me to the 1,000-kilometre race on the Nordschleife of the Nürburgring.
There's no other circuit like the Nordschleife anywhere in the world.
It's very long, 25 kilometres, with sharp changes of elevation and lots of bends.
You can basically never do the perfect lap, and that's the special challenge of this circuit.
I was hooked, and it was then I decided that I wanted to be a racing driver.
We founded Manthey Racing in 1996.
We started out in the Porsche Supercup, which
we won four years in a row, from 1997 to 2000.
I have experience both as a driver and an engineer, and
because I build and maintain most of my own cars, that's a huge help.
The tyre is the key link
between the chassis and the road,
so you need the best possible suppliers because, for example, if you're on a 5-kilometre track
and you want to cut your time by one second,
you have to get an extra 30 hp out of the car.
If your tyre supplier has done a good job, that bumps it up to 1.5 seconds.
If components aren't versatile enough for our needs,
we make them ourselves
and test them on the Nordschleife.
The difference between a Manthey car and another car is difficult to explain,
but our clients benefit from our accumulated expertise.
Increasing a car's performance means saving weight,
and making it more powerful.
For example, we took part in the International GT Open this year,
we entered a new championship,
where we had a huge amount of competition from the likes of Ferrari and Aston Martin.
It was a big challenge for us. We're the current champions,
and I hope we still will be at the end of the year.