The gullwing race car of the racing team from Worms/ Germany finished the second VLN race of the current season which was primarily used as another test under racing conditions for the highlight of the season, the Nürburgring 24 Hour Race, in eleventh place. The SLS AMG GT3 with start number seven was driven by Nico Bastian (Frankfurt/ Germany), Christian Hohenadel (Dudweiler/ Germany) and Michael Zehe (Flörsheim-Dalsheim/ Germany).
ROWE RACING showed a convincing performance in the morning already during qualifying. Qualifying driver Nico Bastian had an excellent practice lap and, with the fastest time of 8:01,441 minutes, started the race from pole position. In the race shortly afterwards, his team mate and start driver Christian Hohenadel was able to keep the gullwing race car in the leading group. An accident in lap five in which two cars were involved stopped this first exciting part of the race. the red flag came out, followed by a suspension of the race over two and a half hours. The race was restarted a little after 16:00hrs but, due to the long break, the remaining race duration was shortened down to two hours.
The ROWE RACING gullwing car was driven by Nico Bastian at the restart and the man driver from Frankfurt was able to keep a position in the leading group right away. In the remaining part of the race, he had very close fights until he had a collision with a competitor, which was not his fault, and spun as a consequence. He changed to Michael Zehe at the pit stop in lap eight. The latter was not able to make up the gap to the race leaders in these last laps and finally took the chequered flag in 13th place after the total of 14 race laps. The addition of the times achieved in both parts finally showed the team in place 11.
ROWE RACING team manager Hans-Peter Naundorf: \”A crazy race today. After our start from pole position, we managed to make a good pace in the leading group and kept second place. Then the accidents occurred. Thank God that nothing more serious happened to the drivers involved. After the break, we had a good start again before this incident with the BMW of the Schubert Team upon which we spun. Unfortunately, we could not move up further afterwards.\”
The next VLN race will be the 56th ADAC ACAS H&R Cup to take place on 26 April 2014. ROWE RACING will not take part in that race as they will for the first time compete in the ADAC GT Masters in Oschersleben that weekend (25 April to 27 April 2014).
