1977 ASS LOLA: BARNFIND BACK UP TO SPEED
The European Formula Super Vee Championship ran from 1977 up to 1982, sporting some interesting competitors with Prince Leopold von Bayern being one of them. The inaugural championship was won by Dutchman and future Indy 500 winner Arie Luyendijk, driving a Lola T326. The T326 was the follow-up to the Championship winning T324 and it was a further development of the successful T320 series.
This ASS Lola is one of only four cars that were converted from the original Lola T326 to an ASS Lola. It was delivered to German racing driver Frank Lampe in 1977 as a Super Vee. The ASS Company (Andreas Stadler Schwetzingen) modified the front and rear wing plus its side pods for Lampe to compete in the European Formula Super Vee Championship.
As the Super Vee Championship stopped because of the high rivalry with the Formula 3 series, Frank Lampe’s ASS Lola disappeared but was discovered several years later at a Hill Climb event. The owner had converted the 1.600 cc air cooled engine to a VW Golf water-cooled engine. The car then disappeared again only to be found decades later neglected in an old barn. German Rüdiger Mager restored the ASS Lola piece back to its original state. The restoration of the car was completed in 2016 and it returned to the tracks at the Super VW Festival at Le Mans.
Since 2019 the car is in ownership of Thomas Cramer from Köln who will race the car at the Classic GP Assen. Cramer did not just bring the car back to the race track, he also brought it back up to speed finishing on the podium regularly.
