FIA Championship Festivity

07. October 2008On Sunday evening on the Penarrubia Country Estate, around 15 km north of the Circuito del Jarama, there was again the FIA Festivity where, as a tradition, not only the champions are honoured, but all the pilots belonging to the big family of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship. Before the actual highlight, the presentation of the prizes, took place the truck racers had to exercise patience until after midnight. Earlier a multicourse dinner had been served, while, on a large screen, Kaminio TV showed a montage of all nine rounds. As those were mainly the most spectacular scenes, the teams broke into loud and continuous applause all the time – and so there wasn’t much time left for the meal.
At the FIA party there are also trophies given to those pilots who did not make it into the points. The drivers who most of all enjoyed the deafening cheers of their truck racing colleagues, were the two DAF pilots David Patalacci and Michel Basanelli. In Jarama something happened to Patalacci he never before experienced in his whole truck racing career. The French original not only incurred several penalties for over-speeding, but he headed also the top-speed list several times. But the DAF pilot will certainly take pride in that incident rather than being annoyed. Besides, there were of course again some more or less ‘tongue-in-cheek’ prizes. You can call on Egi Bartmann, the Bernau team’s kind-hearted soul, whenever you feel hungry or thirsty. The convinced Bavarian has always some victuals in stock. As a reward he received a Special-Egi kitchen apron. Javier Mariezcurrena got an award for the most spectacular crash and Dominique Lachèze for the most considerable improvement. For many years Lachèze was speeding over the tracks in his absolutely photogenic Mack-Hauber – very spectacular but most often without gaining points. But now, within a year, he gained more points with his MAN than in all the years before.
Mikael Johansson received a trophy for his venturous drift performances which are very much appreciated by the audience. The Swede is actually hopelessly below standard with his old Scania, especially when the extremely stressed tyres are rather worn out after the first half of the race distance. At that point – that’s Johansson’s intention – all he can do is to offer the fans a good show. But he hopes that next year he will be able to get involved in the fight for the points with a completely new construction. Balazs Szobi was already successful during his first truck racing year, and that’s why he received the trophy “Rookie of the Year”. Next year the likeable Osso Team from Hungary plans to improve their performance; and they want to participate in the truck Jochen Hahn drove this season and became fourth in the overall standing of the championship. By the way, Hahn collected the “Black Smoke” award for being the heaviest smoker. With his fourth place the only German top pilot has fulfilled all expectations and was – behind two-times European Champion Antonio Albacete – second-best MAN pilot. The Spaniard, on the other hand, had finally to give in to the mostly somewhat faster Buggyra Freightliners. Although title contender Markus Bösiger scored the highest number of victories this season, he also suffered a lot of throwbacks. And so finally the Swiss had to concede the title to his Czech team mate David Vrsecky.
The team ranking was also won by Buggyra ahead of Team Koller + Schwemmer, Team Frankie and Team Horne-Bermejo.