„Altogether, I can be very happy, even though the VLN result does not really reflect our performance“, said Martin Kohlhaas who was nevertheless in quite a good mood after this seventh round of the VLN endurance racing championship. The racing one team manager observed his team performing very well in two championships at the same time. With the 6h race, the season’s highlight was on the calender of the VLN.
The eighth place in the BMW-Cup class and third position in class SP8 were however not really brilliant for Kohlhaas. „Today, we were unlucky in the race with both of our cars.“ In the qualifying before the race, the team of racing one was however able to demonstrate their potential. Both the Afri-Ferrari and the Tracoe-BMW gained pole position in their respective class. But they should not be able to maintain their leading positions.
At the start, racing one took the risk and fitted slick tyres despite a rain shower just before the start. „Finally, this was the right decision even though we were first of all overtaken after the start.“ The track then dried out more and more so that all of their competitors had to proceed to the pits for a tyre change and racing one was able to move into the lead in both classes.
In the fourth race lap, however, an Aston Martin did not notice Benjamin Leuchter who was about to overtake and pushed him off the track. The 235i Racing slowly moved back to the pits with a broken wheel suspension. „We were able to replace all the damaged parts, but we lost about 18 minutes.“ A really good result in the very competitive Cup was spoiled. Shortly before the race end, the Tracoe-BMW anyhow set the fastest time in its class and thus confirmed the committed chase to make up ground which resulted in a final eighth place. Kohlhaas: „I would have appreciated the race to run over two more hours, in this case we could have further moved up.“
A similar bad experience made the Afri-Ferrari: Mike Jäger was sitting behind the steering wheel when he, too, was rudely pushed off the track after an overtaking manoeuvre. It took eight minutes to repair the Afri-Ferrari and to send it back onto the Nordschleife to catch up. After all, the crew finished in third place.
