At the fourth race in the current season of the VLN endurance racing championship Nürburgring, the recently created team TinTag Racing from Würzburg/ Germany exceeded their own expectations. Christian Kohlhaas (Andernach/ German) and Alexander Mattschull (Bad Homburg/ Germany) took the chequered flag with their Ferrari 458 as winners in class SP 8 (VLN Specials over 4000 and up to 6250 cc) and scored an excellent twelfth overall position. “We are ahead of our own schedule”, said a happy Danny Pfeil, the ‘boss’ of the racing team with the Italian sports car. “Our original schedule was to successively improve by five places in each race in order to finally finish in the top fifteen. With position 21 on the starting grid following the qualifying and position twelve in the race which we have attained on our own we have now achieved this target much earlier than originally expected.”
Once the chequered flag came out, there were accordingly only bright faces amongst the team members and the drivers after this top result. “With lap times below 8:40 minutes, we have already now realised an acceptable practice speed and we are able to set constant lap times in the race which come very close to the top ten”, said Alexander Mattschull. “I am very happy with the power of our close-to-production 458 which is absolutely comparable to the performance of a GT3 car.” The TinTag Ferrari demonstrated that the red sports car from Maranello represents an alternative to Porsche and Audi at the Nordschleife. “Any interested person wishing to assure himself of this fact has at all times the possibility to grab the steering wheel to race”, said ‘boss’ Danny Pfeil. “Just give a call!”
Specific coaching of the Pro-Am drivers at the Nordschleife
In the preparation of the VLN round, the technical staff of GT Corse from Frankfurt had test sessions at the Red Bull Ring (Austria) and at the circuit Paul Ricard (France) on their schedule in order to further develop the technical side of the race car. Furthermore, the two Pro-Am drivers Christian Kohlhaas and Alexander Mattschull proceeded to a special coaching at the Nordschleife with Pierre Kaffer, head coach and test driver at the team TinTag Racing. “Quite a few things were new for me and I had to learn in order to get the right feeling for the Ferrari at the Nordschleife as the aerodynamics works totally different”, said Christian Kohlhaas. “Due to the specific coaching, I have now changed some points in my driving and thus got a much better feeling for the car. I can now try to go further to my limits.” The performance curve of TinTag Racing goes clearly upwards as the experienced team around Technical Director and expert at the Nordschleife, Martin Kohlhaas, is not only focussed on the improvement in performance of the race car but also on increasing the potential of the drivers.
