The finale of the VLN endurance racing championship featured plenty of thrilling action. The decisions in the fights about the win in the various class classifications and about the Trophies was only known in the last rounds of the year. One of those was the VLN speed Trophy. The winners in this category after the last race of the year 2015 finally was the Walkenhorst BMW-Team powered by Dunlop. In addition to the highly prestigious trophy, they could also celebrate second place for the BMW Z4 GT3 in class SP9 and the fastest timed lap of the season.
The heavy fog on Saturday morning at the 40th DMV Münsterlandrennen first of all put great strain on all the participants, it was not possible to start the qualifying session according to schedule. The relieving message that the first session of the day should start at 11h10 then fortunately came. The circuit was dry but the visibility on some track sections was still severely restricted. The two drivers in the Walkenhorst Z4, however, kept cool and did not get distracted. At the beginning, Victor Bouveng completed an excellent lap and set a provisional fastest time. Later on, the times improved again and Jesse Krohn tried his luck. He drove the Walkenhorst-BMW around the Eifel circuit in a time of 8:01.303 minutes, gained pole position and marked the fastest time of the complete season.
Later on, the race distance was shortened from four to three hours. With their pole position, Krohn and Bouveng seemed to have a perfect starting position but dropped back down to 27th position later on due to a time penalty inflicted in the practice. But the two BMW juniors were fighting hard, set the fastest lap time in class SP9 with 8:08.196 minutes and moved up until third place overall. They were, however, stopped in their efforts to catch up so brilliantly as the race was stopped 15 minutes before the scheduled distance when the weather conditions got worse again. Pursuant to the regulations, the classification in any such case is based on the result at the end of the penultimate lap and Bouveng/Krohn therefore finished only in sixth overall position and in second place of their class SP9. Krohn: “We were the fastest today and had a fantastic pace all day. We would have had a good chance to win the overall classification without that penalty and without the red flag. I had great fun throughout the whole race and some overtaking manoeuvres were absolutely fantastic. A good result to conclude the season.”
