The ‘rain games’ of the VLN highlight of the season, the 6h Opel-Ruhr-Pokal-Rennen provided a lot of excitement for the Team Black Falcon. Their good performance was not always rewarded by the changing weather conditions in the Eifel but the Porsche of the racing team from Meuspath near the Nürburgring nevertheless provided good results and the team could finally celebrate their success.
Again a strong performance was shown by the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup of the Black Falcon Team Reissdorf Alkoholfrei in class SP7 for VLN Specials up to four litres cylinder capacity and drivers Andreas Weishaupt, Adam Christodoulou, Anders Fjordbach and Tim Scheerbarth. The driver trio in the clearly strongest car in their class was leading until the disaster was approaching. The team was out on slick tyres when the Nordschleife within minutes changed into a true slide of which Tim Scheerbarth became victim. Even though the crash into the Armco barriers happed at low speed, the resulting damage on the radiator spoiled all chances for a win and they had to stop the race.
Almost the same experience made the sister car with drivers Willi Friedrichs, Marcus Löhnert, Tobias Nell and Andreas Ziegler who had a good race until they went off. However, the consequences for the team with start number 56 were of minor nature only. They did not crash into any barriers and thus only lost quite a lot of time. For the remainder of the race, the Black Falcon Team TMD Friction driver remained cool and celebrated a third place on the podium at the end of the six hour race distance.
An extremely turbulent running of the race had also Ivan Jacoma, Manuel Metzger and Christian Schmitz when they finally took the chequered flag in second place in the class of production cars. In the first part of the race already, a small collision with another car provided a moment of shock for them. The driver trio then lost several minutes due to a subsequent tyre damage. The team nevertheless kept track of the adverse weather conditions and temporarily even dominated the GT cars.
At their side on the podium finished two Porsche Carrera drivers, Gerwin and Philip, who have attracted a lot of attention throughout the year due to their constant improvements, even in the most difficult moments. The team did not encounter any kind of problems, last but not least due to the always necessary little bit of luck in their tyre choice but also due to their reasonable driving in the heavy rain showers. Philip and Gerwin completed an almost perfect ‘weather test’ at the Nordschleife and finished third in their class.
All the chances on a top result for the Porsche Cayman S driven by Jürgen Bleul, Jean-Louis Hertenstein, Panagiotis Spilliopoulos and Sören Spreng were spoiled at the moment in which a competitor made a mistake and crashed into the rear of the Black Falcon Team TMD Friction race car. Despite the loss of time due to the repair, the Cayman team managed to move up again in the chaotic weather conditions. When the chequered flag finally came out, the team was shown in fifth place in class V6.
