Debut in the endurance racing championship: The team of ROWE RACING, brand new in 2011, celebrated its first overall win at the sixth round of the current season in the VLN Langstreckenmeisterschaft Nürburgring – the 34th RCM DMV Grenzlandrennen. The drivers Michael Zehe (Flörsheim-Dalsheim/ Germany), Alexander Roloff (Berlin/ Germany) and Roland Rehfeld (Blankenfelde/ Germany) clearly dominated the field of 165 cars with their Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3.
Due to technical problems, the gullwing race car with number 13 achieved only tenth position on the grid in the timed practice on Saturday morning. The problem could however be solved until the race start. After the start lights showed green and the race was started, start driver Roland Rehfeld was first able to set a really good pace and moved up into fourth place until their first pit stop.
Alex Rohloff who resumed the race showed the same strong performance. He managed to go into the lead in lap ten and to gain a small advance. Due to many accidents in which several cars were involved the red flag was shown little later and the race was interrupted. As the starting order for the restart is based on the last complete race lap, the team of ROWE RACING had to take the restart from second place “only”.
Alexander Roloff: „After the restart, I was quickly able to move ahead of the Cup-Porsche driven by the Busch twins and then had a very fair fight with Arno Klasen in the Frikadelli-Porsche before I was able to pass him in the traffic. Our pit crew was ready for our last change of drivers when the red flag was shown again.”
The race which was scheduled to run over four hours was finally stopped after 162 minutes race time with, however, full championship points to be awarded.
Team manager Hans-Peter Naundorf: „After an exciting race day with technical problems in qualifying, we are more than happy with our victory. The two red flags, too, did not at all confuse our team, we kept cool and finally managed to win with our strategy. Our drivers have applied our tactical plans perfectly and had to fight for the lead even twice. After the bad luck in the first half of the season, the whole team of ROWE RACING is really happy and will later today celebrate the victory accordingly.”
The win of the team ROWE RACING is the first overall victory in the current VLN season with a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 on Dunlop tyres.
A 30 minutes summary of the race will be shown on TV channel SPORT1 on 6th of August at 13:00hrs.
