Back to the Ring, back to the top group: After a long winter break, ROWE RACING is back at the Nürburgring Nordschleife with a strong performance. After the cancellation of the first VLN round due to snow, the German racing team from Bubenheim used today’s launch of the season for a first evaluation of their performance in the preparation of the declared highlight of the season, the Nürburgring 24 Hour Race (17 – 20 May 2013). All of the three SLS AMG GT3 hereby showed a convincing performance and after the four hours race distance, the team could enjoy seventh, ninth and eighteenth positions in the field which figured more than 20 cars in total.
The best result of the team was scored by Thomas Jäger (Munich), Kenneth Heyer (Mönchengladbach/ Germany), Jan Seyffarth (Querfurt-Leimbach/ Germany) and Alexander Roloff (Berlin). Their SLS AMG GT3 with start number six was amongst the fastest cars in the morning qualifying which they finished into sixth place under partly still wet track conditions. The race was then completely held in the dry and the driver quartet was easily able to compete in the leading group. In the highly competitive race, final driver Jan Seyffarth finally secured the first top ten position of the season for ROWE RACING.
The second top ten position for the team was scored by the sister car with number 21, driven by Lance David Arnold (Duisburg/ Germany), Sven Hannawald (Munich) and Thorsten Drewes (Bispingen/ Germany). The driver trio which included the former ski-jump start who, just as motor sport rookie Drewes, made his debut at the Nordschleife in the SLS AMG GT3 took the chequered flag in ninth place. Thus they gained 3 places compared to their position on the starting grid. An even bigger step forward made the third ROWE RACING gullwing race car with drivers Michael Zehe (Flörsheim-Dalsheim/ Germany), Marko Hartung (Wallroda7 Germany), Mark Bullitt (Miami(USA) and Reinhold Renger (Rothenburg/ Germany). After a 40th place in qualifying, they moved up into 18th position in the race.
ROWE RACING team manager Peter Naundorf: “This was a good start for us. I am very happy with the performance of our team, but I am not so happy with the balance of performance classification of our cars. Due to the new regulations, we have a higher fuel consumption, we have to take longer stops and are all together hence less competitive. We could for example not fight about the overall victory today with our number seven which was still possible last year. I was positively surprised in particular by our new drivers in our team which adapted themselves immediately. It may well go on this way.”
