Joe Schmitz had signed with the gentle-swiss-racing team to compete in the Aston Martin V8 Vantage only a few days before the 6h ADAC Ruhr-Pokal-Rennen at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. The young champion learned everything he needed to race in the GT4 on Friday during taxi rides for invited guests of the team from Switzerland.
In the qualification on Saturday, he set a lap time of 9:49.994 minutes which was below the race car’s possibilities, but Schmitz did not want to take any unnecessary risks. However, this time brought the team with drivers Trio Schmitz / Gregor Morawitz / Mario Ketterer onto 89th grid position amongst the 188 participants. The racing marathon in the Eifel Region was marked by adverse weather conditions so than spins and offs were frequently observed. Schmitz started the race on dry-weather tyres but he had to come to a first pit stop already after almost one hour as it started to rain.
He then continued the second hour of his stint on wet-weather tyres and changed the steering wheel after one third of the race and into 63rd position to Ketterer. The race driver from the Breisgau area, southwest in Germany, decided to continue on dry-weather tyres but some more drizzles and the dark clouds caused him, too, to change back to wet-weather tyres. The strong wind, though, chased the rain clouds away from the Nürburgring and the expected rain showers never really came. The Swiss driver came back to the pits again to change to slick tyres.
After these two unscheduled pit stops, the multinational team had dropped back a lot in the classification. Morawitz continued in the Aston Martin and changed to Schmitz two hours before the race end when they were in 82nd place. The British sports car was running perfectly and the student of mechanical engineering apparently felt very comfortable. He could improve his lap time to 9:28.238 minutes and took the chequered flag at 6 p.m. into a satisfactory 56th overall position.
