The team race&event based at Radevormwalde continues on its way to success. Both at the fourth and at the fifth race of the endurance racing championship at the Nürburgring, they achieved a class victory and a second class position respectively in the Honda S2000. “A big compliment to Eckhard Geulen, he is constantly improving and the second class victory of the season is the well-deserved reward”, said team manager Martin Mohr. “Of course, we had expected more if we had entered the BMW, but sometimes you just have bad luck.”
After the early engine damage at the 24 Hours end of May, the BMW Z4 M-Coupé had not been entered for the fourth VLN Race. On the one hand, Heinz Schmersal (Wuppertal) and Stephan Rösler (Lichtenfels) had not been able to participate for job reasons and on the other hand, the preparation of the race car had not yet been finished. So Schmersal, Rösler and Christoph Koslowski (Wuppertal) were participating in this fifth race of the championship with an accordingly high motivation.
And it was going on well for quite a long time. In the class of the Specials up to 3500 cc, start driver Koslowski was into second position with a gap of only 30 seconds behind his make colleague of the team Dörr-Motorsport. Due to a communication problem with the pit crew, though, the race driver from Wuppertal did not come to the pits at the end of his ninth lap. In the next lap, four kilometres before the end of the lap, Koslowski then had to stop with an empty fuel tank. He lost about a quarter of an hour until he could rejoin the race. An eighth place was therefore the maximum result they were able achieve.
“The fog has lifted”, said Eckhard Geulen after the second victory of the season in the class of the Specials up to 2500 cc. “I was able to improve my personal fastest lap time by almost 20 seconds onto 10.12 minutes. A great thank you to Honda Technical Director Stefan Schlesack who had given us very valuable tips for the suspension set-up!” On the way to the class victory at the fifth championship race, Geulen shared the steering wheel in the Honda S2000 with Peter Schmidt (Eltville). Two weeks ago, the duo Geulen/ Koslowski had achieved the second place in their class with the Honda.
Mike Stursberg, one of the four regular drivers in the BMW Z4, participated in the team of Uwe Alzen for the first time at this fifth championship round. “He had asked me whether I would be ready to support the regular driver in his second Cup-911 and I accepted immediately of course.” Right away, the race driver from Wermelskirchen felt very comfortable in the Porsche and finally finished into ninth place of the Cup class together with Hans Riegel.
