At the 7th round of the VLN endurance racing championship last weekend, the ADAC Ruhr-Pokal-Rennen, the TIC racing Team achieved a brilliant 6th place in class SP3T (VLN Specials 3 T – over 1600 cc up to 2000 cc with turbochargers) after a fight against 17 strong competitors. The team also finished into an excellent 47th overall position amongst 200 starters. The crew thus achieved their second-best result in the 2011 season – despite the difficult track conditions at the Nordschleife.
Following the qualifying session in the morning, Karsten Quadder (Solingen/ Germany) took the start at 12 o’clock from 10th grid position in their class (75th place overall) and in heavy rain. The Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X TR09, htough, came to the pits after only 2 laps. The weather had changed and the team had decided to change to slick tyres. Quadder set a lap time of 9:51.969 minutes in his fifth lap when the track indeed became dry and thus confirmed that their decision to change tyres had been right.
Only one lap later the team proceeded to another pit stop. As it had restarted to rain and they wanted to adjust the four-wheel driven race car at the best to the track conditions, the car was again fitted with rain tyres. Quadder, such equipped, moved up into 8th class position after the total of 11 laps.
At about 14:15hrs, Frank Koch (Cologne) took over the steering wheel. In his second race for the team, Koch completed a race duration of 2.5 hours out of the 6 scheduled hours. At 16:50hrs and after 13 laps, he changed the Evo back again to Quadder. At that time, the team was found into 9th class position. Within the next 50 minutes, Quadder showed a brilliant performance and succeeded in gaining another two places. Class position 7 seemed to be confirmed when the race was stopped at 17:53hrs with the red flag due to new heavy rain showers.
This should, however, not be the final position: After the exclusion of a competitor in their class, the team was finally classified sixth. “A race in which difficult decisions had to be taken and ours had always been right! A fantastic team result with 5 pit stops”, said the team manager of the day, Thomas Schwarz (GETRAG FORD Transmission), happily.
The team must now proceed to eliminate all the traces left behind the long and hard race until the 24th of September when the next round in the ‘green hell’ will take place. The TIC racing Team will again be at the start of the 43rd ADAC Barbarossapreis, the 8th round of the VLN endurance racing championship, to run over the distance of 4 hours.
