The 2015 season of the VLN endurance racing championship Nürburgring is now history. The ten rounds once again demonstrated the colourful diversity in this European-wide unique grassroots series. This year again, the world’s most beautiful and longest track attracted drivers and manufacturers from many nations and they all wanted to prove themselves by performing well at the ‘Green Hell’ in all kinds of car models and types. Whether it concerns a maxi tuned GT3 race car or a production-based vehicle, they all find their place in one of the VLN classes. As colourful as the field of participants was, as colourful were the winners’ podiums at the various races. The races in the Eifel produced many surprises and almost each team and each manufacturer had a reason to celebrate during the year.
The most common car that the spectators at the Nordschleife could see was BMW. With an average of 52 participating vehicles that were trying to master the difficult 24.358 kilometres long circuit, the greatest number of race cars from amongst the total of 27 manufacturers came from the Munich brand. These statistics show Porsche in second position with 34 cars and Opel with 17 vehicles in third place. So it comes as no surprise that, with the average of 19 participants, the Cup 5 class, the BMW M235i Racing Cup, was the class with the greatest number of competitors in the season. In a thrilling finale, Michele Di Martino and Moritz Oberheim finally celebrated the cup victory and at the same time secured their win in the Junior Trophy in which 25 drivers up to 25 years were fighting for the title. The second strongest class in terms of numbers of participants was SP7 with 14 cars on the average, followed by SP9, Cup1 class and the Opel Astra OPC GTC Cup in third place in the statistics, comprising twelve cars respectively on the average.
The various race wins were of course primarily scored by the GT3 race cars. Three times in total, a Mercedes-Benz was on top of the podium, Audi and Porsche celebrated two victories, Ford and BMW one each. The most successful team in terms of overall victories was Black Falcon: The team was able to jubilate three times, twice about a Mercedes-Benz triumph and once about a Porsche triumph. A man who was significantly involved in the team’s successes is Manuel Metzger. The race driver who lives in Switzerland shared the cockpit of the Black Falcon SLS AMG Gt3 with Hubert Haupt, Yelmer Buurmann and Adam Christodoulou when they won the ninth VLN race and then crossed the finish line at the subsequent race together with ‘Gerwin’ and Philipp Eng in first place in a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup. A series by which Metzger earned two additional entries in the VLN history of the year 2015 as he was the only driver who was able to win two subsequent races in two different makes. With an average speed of 169.799 kilometres per hour, the winning trio moreover completed the fastest race of the season at the finale. The qualifying already revealed that the finale would see fast lap times. Jesse Krohn and Victor Bouveng in the BMW Z4 GT3 of Walkenhorst had gained pole position with a time of 8:01.303 minutes and set the fastest lap time of the season 2015. The eighth VLN round saw the closest qualifying, the top ten were separated by only 6.487 seconds. The closes finish was performed by Uwe Alzen and Dominik Schwager in their Ford GT who won ahead of Dominik and Mario Farnbacher in the Lexus RC-F GT3 with an advance of 14.592 seconds at the fifth race of the VLN series.
All these are names and cars that stood out from the mass in the year 2015 due to their special performances. It was however again the numbers of participants and the diversity of the series which makes it so outstandingly successful. 935 drivers, amongst those 18 women, from 42 nations started the adventure Nordschleife, the average of 155 cars at each race took up the challenge which the unique Eifel track provides. 566 participants, the greatest number, came from Germany, 66 came from Switzerland and 34 from Great Britain. But the grid also included drivers for example from Ecuador, Israel, South Africa, Tanzania and the Chad. The total of 29,143 laps were completed in the ten races which comes up to a distance of 710,185.77 kilometres. A distance which would almost cover the trip from the earth to the moon and back again.
