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Mercedes RaceTruck at Recaro Days

Mercedes RaceTruck at Recaro Days

03. August 2007During the last weekend of July for the first time the Recaro Days were held at the Nürburgring, and right away the crowd of 22,000 had to acquaint themselves with the unpredictability of the Eifel weather. But this could not dampen their spirits, after all, how often do you have a chance to see such a gathering of pimped and unusual cars. To most of the fans Jochen Hahn’s Mercedes Benz RaceTruck was certainly the most exotic among all the exotica. Such a whopper with more than 1000 HP they had never seen before. Admittedly, with regard to the HP the truck was outdone by a Quad from the Netherlands with a 1,400 HP turbine, but this car – same as most of the vehicles equipped with these high-performance engines – could not really exploit its full potential because of the wet tarmac. And so the even more powerful Dragsters could only be admired at the paddock; to let them compete on the start-finish straight would have been much too dangerous.
And also the Drift Challenge held here was severely afflicted by the fitful weather. All the more exciting it was for the people who were given a ride in one of the Race Taxis. The Mercedes RaceTruck was available, too, and of course it was one of the most surrounded vehicles of all the racers, although there were quite a few top class race cars, above all from the Long-distance Cup VLN and the 24 Hours. But there were other whimsical vehicles, too, for instance a ’82 VW van from Switzerland with a 500 PS engine, which – besides its huge Porsche engine – was equipped with not much more than 4 race-seat buckets.
However, the Team Hahn Racing had not only come to the Ring for promotion purposes, but they also planned to test different set-ups. But these plans were thwarted by the weather. On Saturday afternoon there was even some sunshine, and so Jochen Hahn could do especially his free practices under relatively favourable conditions. And as – towards the end of the session – the engine developed some minor problems, they even procured another engine and installed it during the night. But in the end that was a waste of time and effort, because on Sunday there were almost continuous heavy rains so that it wasn’t possible to have comparative values for the different tests. So the only thing the truck racer could do was delight his ‘co-pilots’ and the audience with very long and spectacular drifts, which is something truck racers normally refrain from doing because of the enormous material wastage. But the wet track allowed Jochen Hahn to do some stunts that even impressed the Drift Challenge professionals.