With their victory at the fourth round of the VLN Langstreckenmeisterschaft Nürburgring, Chris Mamerow (Castrop-Rauxel/ Germany) and Porsche returner Mark Basseng (Leutenbach/ Germany) secured the second consecutive win of the season for the team around team principle Peter Mamerow (Castrop-Rauxel) in their Porsche 911 GT3 R.
On the previous day of this fourth race already, team principle Peter Mamerow had created a big surprise in announcing the nomination of Marc Basseng as second driver. The multiple VLN overall winner justified the confidence placed in him in qualifying already. With a time of 8:17.288 minutes and the resulting pole position, Basseng demonstrated that after his guest participation in an Audi race car he was also able to perfectly and successfully control the Porsche GT3 R.
At the beginning, start driver Chris Mamerow was able to defend the lead but he had to let Frank Stippler (Bad Münstereifel/ Germany) in the Audi R8 pass during his first stint despite achieving the fastest race lap of 8:18.327 minutes set by a Porsche. “I have really driven the car at its limits. It is not possible to do better under these conditions”, commented Chris Mamerow their second overall position after he had changed to Marc Basseng. Basseng held second position with constant fast lap times and gave the steering wheel back to Chris Mamerow after almost two third of the race distance.
Rain set in 30 minutes before the race end and seemed to upset the apparently fixed positions again. In the following laps, Chris Mamerow again demonstrated his driving skill under extreme racing conditions and closed the gap of about 30 seconds up to only 0.2 seconds within only two laps, combined with a perfect tyre change of the pit crew. The following final part of the race was hard to top in excitement. The two leaders passed the 24.43 kilometres long twisty Nürburgring circuit neck-to-neck until Chris Mamerow was able to benefit of a small inattention of ex-champion Hans-Joachim Stuck (Austria) only 100 metres before the finish. He finished into first place in the Mamerow Porsche with an advance of 0.240 seconds after a total race time of 4 hours.
The second Mamerow Porsche in contrast was not lucky in the race. The team of Michael Zehe (Flörsheim-Dalsheim/ Germany), Marco Schelp (Berlin/ Germany) and Alexander Roloff (Berlin/ Germany) started the race in the ROWE- Porsche 911 GT3 Cup S from eighth position. Start driver Alexander Roloff followed up on the good performance at the 24h Race when the ROWE motor sport team caused quite a lot of excitement in finishing as second fastest Porsche team in the Cup S powered by Mamerow. Roloff, into second position, came to the pits in the lap nine to change to Marco Schelp. Due to this scheduled pit stop, the team had dropped back into 5th overall position when they rejoined the race. In lap 17, a tyre blow-out damaged the Porsche so badly that Marco Schelp had to stop the race.
The next racing challenge on the championship calendar is the 50th ADAC-Reinoldus-Langstreckenrennen to take place on 3rd July.
