ROWE RACING is going to celebrate a very special debut in the upcoming motor sport season: For the first time ever, the racing team of the lubricants manufacturer ROWE will compete under its own direction and it will enter two brand new Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 race cars for the rounds of the VLN endurance racing series.
The team succeeded in getting mechanical engineer (TU Munich) Hans-Peter Naundorf under contract as team manager. Naundorf, who has been working for the DTM team Persson as Technical Director since 2001, is looking forward to his new duties with excitement: “I am really looking forward to this challenge in endurance racing. There is still a lot of work ahead of us until the start of the season to create the necessary structures and to put the team together”. During his activities in DTM, he looked amongst others after drivers such as Jean Alesi, Gary Paffet, Bruno Spengler, Jamie Green, Paul di Resta, Bernd Mayländer, Susie Stoddart and Matthias Lauda and won the “semi-new car classification” each year since 2006.
The operational tasks for ROWE RACING will be executed by the Motorsport Competence Group (MCG) – also under the direction of Hans-Peter Naundorf. The headquarters will be established at the Saarland city of St. Ingbert where the team will move into an own, almost 1,200 sqm large hall in the vicinity of the A6 motorway in spring 2011. In addition to the preparation of the race participations, MCG will also conduct additional research and development programmes.
For ROWE owner Michael Zehe, this step represents the consequent continuation of his previous motor sport engagement on his way to achieve even more performance and professionalism: “Both from the technical and the logistic point of view, the participation and the servicing of race cars is an extremely demanding challenge. It offers furthermore a lot of potential for the development of high-performance lubricants. To bring this to perfection is only possible with an own and competent team. I am hence very much looking forward to the cooperation with Hans-Peter Naundorf“.
In addition to the regular drivers from the season 2010, Alexander Roloff and Marco Schelp (both from Berlin), ROWE RACING succeeded in getting former DTM driver (Audi / Opel) and winner of the 24h Race of Daytona Hubert Haupt as well as Klaus Rader (both from Munich) under contract. Negotiations with further experienced long distance drivers are currently still in process.
