It was a start of the VLN endurance racing championship season with ups and downs for the team of ROWE RACING. The car with start number 7 and drivers Thomas Jäger (Munich), Klaus Graf (Dornhan/ Germany) and Alexander Roloff (Berlin) suffered a technical failure in the morning qualifying and, as a consequence, had to take the start from position 30 on the grid. In the race, start driver Thomas Jäger then had to stop the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 in lap 5 already after another technical failure.
The sister car with start number 6 driven by Mark Bullitt (Miami/USA), Marko Hartung (Wallroda/ Germany) and Michael Zehe (Flörsheim-Dalsheim/ Germany) started the race which was scheduled to run over the distance of four hours from 49th position only but was continuously catching up after the start and gaining positions. Their fight through the field ended however after 2 hours and 45 minutes when the race was stopped with the red flag in lap 15 and not resumed due to increasingly bad weather conditions. As more than 160 minutes of the race distance had been covered when the red flag came out, full championship points will be awarded. In the final classification which includes the total of 174 of the starters, car number 6 of the team ROWE RACING finished into 20th position.
Team manager Hans-Peter Naundorf: “Today’s result does not reflect the standard of our performance. Everything was running absolutely perfectly at the test and set-up session one week ago. We are now looking forward and will focus on the next race in two weeks time. As a general principle, we use the first three VLN races to get prepared for the 24 Hour Race in the best possible way.”
The next VLN round, the 37th DMV 4-Hour-Race, will take place on 14th April at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. All the highlights of today’s race will be broadcasted on Wednesday, 4th of April, at 17:30hrs on SPORT1.
