With a ninth VLN victory in a row and as fastest team again in class GT4, Mathol Racing finished the second race of the 2011 season. The competition, however, is slowly getting stronger and stronger. All together, the weekend was however rather mixed for the team around Matthias Holle. The results of the weekend included one retirement, one successful test each for the team of mechanics and for one drivers’ crew in preparation of the 24 Hour Race.
The current flagship of Mathol Racing is now as before the Aston Martin Vantage V8 GT4. Wolfgang Weber, Rickard Nilsson and Norbert Bermes also won the second race of the season and scored their ninth VLN success in a row. When studying the result lists it becomes obvious that the Mathol Aston again finished with an advance of more than one lap ahead of the second placed team of Bonk motorsport. The picture is however deceiving as the pressure applied both by Bonk motorsport as well as by Scheid Motorsport in class GT4 has considerably increased. Both teams enter the total of three BMW M3 GT4 at the Nordschleife to chase the Mathol Aston. During the race, the gap between the Eifelblitz with Scheid and the Aston Marton of Mathol-Racing had meanwhile been only 14 seconds.
“This will become a tough fight during the year”, said regular driver and instructor Wolfgang Weber who is very much looking forward to the competition. Team manager Holle, however, also has a critical view onto the current speed of the BMW: “I know that Bonk and Scheid are doing extremely well, but it is quite astonishing when new drivers straightaway achieve similar times with the GT4 BMW as we. The BMW race cars are new and have not yet completed a lot of testing. We, in contrast, may look back onto one year of development and gained experience. It would perhaps be worthwhile to reconsider the Balance of Performance classification.”
The team of Jörg Kittelmann is also full of anticipation. Together with Klaus-Dieter Müller, he used this second round of the season as a first test for the “project 24 Hours”. Their concern was not at all to achieve fastest times or to win. “We simply wanted to put ourselves as well as all the parts and components to a thorough test.” The Seat Leon Supercopa was running perfectly throughout the 4 hours race duration and finally even finished into third position of the internal Seat classification.
For Sebastian Schäfer, Rüdiger Schicht and Doc Chris in contrast, the race was over after only one and a half hours. The Honda Civic Type R who, named after the new sponsor Philips, has been given the name “speechie” had to retire after an accident.
The team of Thomas Heinrich and Dirk Kauke was not even able to take the start. Whilst they had a good practice session at the beginning, the Honda S2000 then later on remained in the pits. The reason was a total gearbox damage suffered in the last practice lap. The car was brought back to the pits where the mechanical staff had the pleasure to practice for the 24 Hour Race as the S2000 was immediately fitted with a new gearbox. “We must be prepared to possibly change the gearbox also at the 24 Hour Race. So it was good to practice this before in the pits under racing conditions”, said Matthias Holle. After the change was carried out, the car nevertheless did not rejoin the race.
