After an exciting duel, the Bonk-motorsport-Team has scored its second class win in the current season and thus gained the intended victory. With Mario Merten and Wolf Silvester as drivers in the Bonk-BMW M3, team director Michael Bonk has two championship contenders on the road to success. The team from Münster-Nienberge returned home from the fifth round of the BFGoodrich Langstreckenmeisterschaft Nürburgring with a huge winner’s cup.
Mario Merten was already very successful with the Bonk-BMW M3 in the qualification. With the fastest time in class V5, he started the event perfectly. As start driver of the race he then showed all his routine and took the first corner into first place. He managed to defend his lead throughout his complete turn over eight laps.
At this point, however, they had a problem with the power steering which was not working correctly. Team director Michael Bonk consequently changed the racing strategy immediately in order to give the drivers more breaks. Wolf Silvester started the second turn already after eight laps and the first fuel stop. It was no problem at all for him who comes from Nuremberg to defend their first position. He, too, has many years of competition experience and is an excellent racing driver. Both drivers did however not succeed in really pulling away from their competitors.
After another eight laps and still holding first place, Silvester changed back to Merten at the next scheduled fuel stop. But then the events came thick and fast. A violent tempest came up and in lap 21, the gearbox in the BMW M3 failed. They had only fifth gear and their advance of 25 seconds would never ever have been sufficient to defend their lead throughout the remaining three laps. But the team was lucky that things didn’t turn out worse – a cloudburst with heavy rain caused Race Control to stop the race as many cars had gone off the track within seconds only. The race classification was established after 3:12 hours racing time and based on the result after lap 20 which was very much in favour of the Bonk team as it thus scored its well deserved class win on that day.
Last Saturday, the drivers Axel Burghardt / Andreas Möntmann / Jens Moetefindt took the start in the Bonk-BMW 318ti. At the beginning, they showed an excellent performance in the perfectly prepared BMW 318. But then a small mistake of the driver and an error in changing gears on his own fault destroyed the engine in lap seven. This resulted in an early retirement.
The driver duo Stefan Aust / Detlef Hirsch had to stop in the Bonk-M3 last weekend already after the set-up session. Abnormal engine noise caused team director Michael Bonk to be very careful. And as they couldn’t find the reason for the strange noise quickly enough, Aust / Hirsch were not able to start the qualification on Saturday.
