In the 2009 season of the BFGoodrich Langstreckenmeisterschaft Nürburgring, there is not only a lot of excitement in the fights for the day victory. In a photo finish, Daniel Zils and Matthias Unger won with an advance of only 0.195 seconds ahead of the Team Black Falcon and won the group of VLN series production cars for the Besaplast Team Dolate-Motorsport.
“That was harder than anything else I have done so far. To win after such a tough battle which is decided on the start and finish straight at the end of the last lap only is much more fun than to dominate the class with a clear advance”, explains Unger after he got out of the cockpit of the BMW Z4 Coupé.
With their fourth position on class V5 after the timed practice over 90 minutes, the 33rd DMV 250 Meilen Rennen, the penultimate round of the year which took place under rather wet and cold conditions, thereby started rather modestly for the quick crew. As a consequence, the team used the time between practice and race to carry out some modifications on the suspension unit so that they were quite confident at the start of the four hour race.
Similar to the last rounds of the BFGoodrich Langstreckenmeisterschaft, the very first metres on the circuit already were decisive for their victory. Start driver Daniel Zils in the BMW Z4 Coupé thus succeeded in moving up into second position and continued in the slickstream of the leading crew of drivers Ventura, Bierther and Schwerfeld. This was the beginning of an impressive fight about the class win and – as it turned out later – even about the victory in the group of series production cars.
The permanently changing weather conditions, though, made the event become a true gamble in the choice of tyres. “First of all, we started on rain tyres before we decided after five laps to change to slick tyres as the track was drying off. Towards the end of my turn, it became quite cloudy and this is why we decided to take the risk and change to rain tyres. This turned out to be a wrong decision and we lost two and a half minutes”, informed Zils.
Nevertheless, in the final phase of the race Unger was able to move up again to the leading crew of Black Falcon before he was involved in a collision with another competitor when entering the Mercedes Arena. Despite a spin, a damaged rim and a loss of time of several seconds, this time luck was on the side of the team of Dolate-Motorsport. Unger caught up at the section of ‘Hocheichen’ and little later in the area ‘Bergwerk’, he went into the lead which he defended until the finish.
“After we had just missed the group victory two weeks ago, we are all the more happy about this result, and this even though we had to do the last kilometres with a damaged rim due to the incident. The season could well be a little longer for us after the difficult start and the series of success which we have now,” both drivers agreed.
