Almost 90 per cent Ayes for Mercedes Benz

20. October 2007As was to be expected, our survey shows that 89.5 per cent of all voters advocated a further participation of Mercedes Benz in truck racing. Of course, nobody would assume in earnest that such a survey would prompt Mercedes Benz to go back from their decision to withdraw from European truck racing for the time being. We only meant to send a signal to the people in charge, and this signal is clear as daylight, the fans want to see Mercedes Benz in truck racing – not only in Brazil, but in Europe, too. The Stuttgart manufacturer of commercial vehicles will, however, keep on being present at several events of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship with advertising and PR efforts. So there will be ample opportunity to scrutinize now and then those criteria that were the reason for Mercedes’ withdrawal. And in doing so they should also keep the outcome of this survey in mind. The audience and the fans would hardly understand why Mercedes is only present in the paddock, but no longer to be seen on the track.
The survey was completed already several days before the final in Jarama, to direct the attention back to the championship. There were about 30,000 votes, but not nearly all those votes were counted. From the start it was definite that an absolute representativity would not be possible to achieve – which actually is principally not possible with internet surveys, contrary to what some pollsters tell. But nevertheless, we think that – by taking some additional measures – we could successfully prevent some individuals from manipulating the result to their liking by multiple voting, because for the actual evaluation we took only a very small amount of the many clicks, i.e. exactly 3,073 votes – and 2,780 of this total amount came out in favour of Mercedes Benz remaining in the truck racing business. By the way, without these “safety precautions” the ayes would even have amounted to almost 98 per cent. But just to demonstrate the proportionality and to show that such a survey should not be overestimated: during the three and a half weeks the survey was online, we registered about 1.2 million PageImpressions from around 73,000 users with different IP’s.
In Jarama, the Mercedes crew, non-verbally, signified their opinion in regard to Mercedes’ decision to withdraw; on Sunday morning the Mercedes flags, decorated with crapes, were hoisted to half mast.