Despite the rain chaos during the final 30 minutes in the race, it was this weekend simply impossible to beat Rodney Forbes and Kai Riemer. They were dominating the Cup class with their Flying-Horse-Porsche at their discretion. Whilst in practice they were still beaten by 0.483 seconds by a Manthey Porsche, the Weiland race cars clearly demonstrated their power in the race. Even a smaller oil leakage which caused a permanent trail of smoke and quite a dirty rear spoiler on the Cup Porsche did not irritate the two race drivers.
This small problem did not at all result in any change of their pace. The only team in addition to the above mentioned Manthey Porsche which was able to constantly set times below 8:40 minutes at the Nordschleife were Riemer/ Forbes. The last thirty minutes should nevertheless provide quite some thrilling moments. A wet and cold fog suddenly came up in the area of the pit lane and there were some reports on rain out on the track. For reasons of safety, Riemer who was driving the Flying-Horse-Porsche at that time changed to wet weather tyres. The rain was however not as heavy as expected so that the Nordschleife experienced driver returned to the pits only one lap later to change back again. After the following lap, he then had to pay tribute to a very heavy shower and changed to rain tyres again.
“Fortunately, our competitors were faced with the same problems and took similar action so that we did hardly loose any time”, said a relieved team manager Matthias Weiland when he saw that car number 652 was still shown in the lead on the timing screens.
He himself then took over the steering wheel in the Highsociety-Porsche which he shared with Weiland team newcomer Oleksiy Kikireshko from the Ukraine. “It was clear to me that we would not be able to fight for the class win but Oleksiy did a very good job and immediately set fast lap times at the Nordschleife “, said Weiland. The duo finally finished into fifth class position, last but not least because the Ukrainian kept his nerves in the heavy rain and finished the race safely in his car.
The overall positions eight and thirteen achieved by Weiland-Racing were even better than expected. In addition, the fight for the lead in the championship is starting to get exciting by now. With the third highest score of 37.62 points of Forbes, the gap between Rodney Forbes and the leader is quite narrow. If you consider that two results will not be counted fort he final classification, the Australian would be only 0.07 points behind the championship leader.
