After the problems with a broken fuel line at the last round, S Pace Racing had good reason to celebrate this time after the season final of the BFGoodrich Langstreckenmeisterschaft Nürburgring. The class win of Mike Jäger and Harald Hennes had never been in danger, although just before the start, the black racing car got into some troubles.
The race day started very promising for the team. With a time of 9:38.920 minutes, Hennes and Jäger gained pole position within the classification of the Seat endurance racing Challenge. “The set-up of the car is really good. I think today we will be able to finally score the long overdue class win”, predicted Jäger just before the start.
The silken thread by which this victory may hang should become apparent still before the starting signal was given. The leading car in this starting group had left a great distance to the pace car. The pace car then almost came to a stop just behind the last chicane in front of the start and finish straight to wait for the field. When the race cars then closed up to the pace car at quite high speed, they all had to brake very hard. In some driving manoeuvres, Mike Jäger was hit by some competitors and had to cross the start line in the pits. The car was quickly repaired at the pits with some tape before it could rejoin the race.
The damage was luckily not that bad so that Jäger was able to close up to his competitors after a few laps and the Seat went back into the lead of its class. “I was really very lucky”, said Jäger happily, “fortunately I have an excellent back-up by the team of S Pace Racing and our team manager Jochen Schruff and they managed to get the Seat ready to race very quickly again.”
His team mate Harald Hennes, too, was enthusiastic about the performance of the Seat and set some very quick lap times. He was able to further increase the lead in the Seat endurance racing Challenge and thus secured their victory after four hours race distance.
“We can now happily go into the winter break with this victory”, said Jäger. The team will regroup during the next weeks to that they can start the 2010 season even stronger. “We will definitely continue with our Seat next year and of course also our cooperation with the team S Pace Racing”, informed Jäger. In order to optimise costs and drivers’ organisation, he looks at merging with a second team – the next weeks will show if this will actually happen.
