The team Derscheid Motorsport around team manager Rolf Derscheid was full of enthusiasm at the start of the new season of the VLN Langstreckenmeisterschaft Nürburgring. The team had decided to gain experience with a lot of new elements in their package. In the end, they had to swallow some bitter pills that were washed down with the champagne gained for the second place.
The first round of the endurance racing championship Nürburgring (VLN) took place last weekend in early summer weather. The team Derscheid made its debut in two fields: First of all, the team had for the first time entered a BMW 325i salon car in class V4 and secondly, the successful race car of the last years, the BMW 318is participated in the class of standard production cars V2. The new car was driven by Rolf Derscheid (Much/ Germany), Michael Flehmer (Heiligenhaus/ Germany) and Ralph-Peter Moog (Korlingen/ Germany) in the endurance race over the distance of four hours around the circuit of the Grand Prix circuit combined with the famous Nürburgring Nordschleife. Flehmer started the practice over 1.5 hours. The still wet track as a consequence of the fog in the night and the new car caused Flemer to start carefully: He completed two laps and changed to Derscheid who was able to set clearly faster laps as the track was getting drier and drier. The time was fine for a grid position in the front mid-field but not good enough for a position right in the front.
The track then got dry so that Ralph-Peter Moog was able to start the practice session with slick tyres. As the racing line was almost completely dry and he got a lap with almost no yellow flag sectors, he finished into second grid position with his time. The gap behind the class leader was just a little more than the blink of an eye whereas the gap ahead of the next in the classification was almost 30 seconds.
Like in the last years, Flehmer was the start driver. He immediately started to fight for the first position and had a fantastic battle with the leader in class V4. Flehmer applied a lot of pressure but couldn’t find a fair way to overtake and to go into the lead. The more than 20.000 spectators absolutely enjoyed a tough but fair fight between the two rivals. In lap eight, Flehmer came to a scheduled pit stop. Ralph-Peter Moog rejoined the race after a perfect stop carried out by the well-rehearsed pit crew of the team Derscheid. His rival came to the pits one lap later and Moog in the Derscheid car went into the lead. Moog further completed his laps as class leader and increased his lead up to more than 2 minutes. All of a sudden the propulsion failed in lap 15 at the section “Kallenhardt” without any advance notice. Before the experienced Moog was able to react, the car was oversteering, first of all the front of the car crashed into the guardrails and then also, after it spun, the rear. The damages encountered made it impossible to continue and the Derscheid BMW had to retire at this early stage.
Position two for the “small one”
Junior drivers Matthias Butz (Bergisch-Gladbach/ Germany) and Martin Hörter (Ransbach-Baumbach/ Germany) in contrast were more lucky. Even though they failed in practice completely due to a wrong choice of tyres and had to start the race from the back, they managed to move up considerably in the race. Martin Hörter was the start driver in the race and right away convinced with fast lap times. He was catching up constantly with his perfectly prepared BMW 318 is and quickly closed the gap to the other competitors in class V2. His fight with the other competitors and with the most demanding race track of the world, the Nordschleife, continued for eleven laps. Into second position, he came for a pit stop to change to Matthias Butz who was able to go the same pace as his team mate and closed the gap to the class leader. It was however not realistically possible to catch him so that Butz took it easy and preferred to finish the race without taking any risks and without possibly causing any damages on the car. After four hours race duration, the Derscheid rookie duo took the chequered flag into second place of class V2 with a gap of about four minutes.
