Second victory of the season for the BMW Z4, six times on the podium for the Honda S2000: The sixth round of the endurance racing championship turned out to be another impressive success for the race&event team which is based in Radevormwald. “But we had to work harder than ever to achieve this result”, said the tired but overjoyed team manager Martin Mohr. “This success would not have been possible without the fantastic work of each and every team member!”
The BMW suffered an engine failure already in the free practice session the previous day. The engine was replaced and it was long after the sun had set that the new one gave its first sign of life. Drivers Heinz Schmersal (Wuppertal), Christoph Koslowski (Wuppertal) and Mike Stursberg (Wermelskirchen) started the timed practice highly motivated, but after only one lap they got gearbox problems and the team had to change gearbox as well! “Luckily, we were able to finish the work in time so that we could start the six hour race”, informed Chris Koslowski with a special thank to his team.
After the start from 88th grid position, Koslowski was brilliantly catching up. In lap four, the race driver from Wuppertal even set a time below the incredible threshold of nine minutes. When it started to rain, the team had to change to rain tyres after five laps and continued on wet-weather tyres for nine more laps. “It was really great fun and I was able to gain a lot of places”, said Koslowski happily after he had moved up into 15th place in his stint.
Heinz Schmersal changed to slick tyres and it turned out that this was the absolutely right decision. “Everything was running perfectly in my turn, too, our team has done a fantastic job. I only had a short moment of shock when at the section Wehrseifen, a Porsche spun and crashed into my side, but apart from some scratches, the car was fortunately not damaged.” Some more rainfalls caused Schmersal to come to the pits after 25 laps which was one lap earlier than scheduled to change the steering wheel to Mike Stursberg.
“It was raining again just before the change of drivers and we thus decided to fit intermediates. You can set quite good lap times in the dry, too, with these tyres”, said Stursberg. The race driver from Wermelskirchen completed 12 laps, including a short refuel stop, with the slightly moulded tyres and set constant lap times of below 9:10 minutes. The BMW M3 right behind had relied on slick tyres for the last laps which was of course quite an advantage. Stursberg, however, handled the final phase of the race brilliantly with all his experience and took the chequered flag after six hours racing time and 37 laps with an advance of 1.475 seconds. They won their class of the Specials up to 3500 cc and finished into 12th overall position!
With the second place in the class of the Specials up to 2500 cc, Eckhard Geulen and Volker Kühn, both from Bonn, made the finally very successful weekend perfect for the team race&event. At the same time, this was the sixth successive time on the podium for the Honda S2000.
