Nogaro Testing Days

03. April 2011Nogaro - Certainly the weather in Nogaro had upset the plans of many of the teams, at least for those people who – just three and a half weeks before the start of the Season in Donington – wanted to do some serious tests. When you go to the South of France in spring, you expect to enjoy sunny weather. But due to the constantly changing track conditions – heavy rain alternating with a brilliant blue sky – you didn’t really know what to make of the results achieved there.
In addition to that several teams got a new telemetry system this year which occasionally didn’t work as it was supposed to do. And sometimes people had to go on working until 3:00 a.m. before they could call it a day – but didn’t actually gain new insights.
In the new paddock of the Circuit Armagnac built some years ago there are pits available where also RaceTrucks can be fixed and maintained, so that at least the mechanics were sheltered from the rain.
The most eager one was the French Aravi Team; no matter if there was rain or sunshine – the blue Renault RaceTruck was almost always on the track. Besides the team’s long-time regular pilot Jean-Loup Fournier there was a second driver, Lionel Montagne. In the Egon Allgäuer Team the two pilots Stuart Oliver (GBR) and Alex Lvov (RUS) apparently swapped their trucks frequently. The two yellow MAN trucks were not yet equipped with their numbers and you could only tell them apart by their different sponsor logos on the windscreens.
Team Truck Sport Bernau wanted their pilots to test the capability of their RaceTrucks. However, the track was too treacherous for that, so that not only Uwe Nittel (GER), who had to adapt to the new truck – he switched from the Buggyra Freightliner with its long bonnet to the cab-over-engine MAN – went off the track several times, but also his Spanish team mate Antonio Albacete, who is the reigning European Champion after all, turned out to be a “gravel collector”. The group around Jochen Hahn – besides the Swabian there was the team of the Finn Mika Makkinen and the Hungarian Oxxo Team with Zoltan Birnbauer – had booked three adjoining pits without partitions. And this was certainly a good thing, because they were the most avid workers. But Hahn would certainly have preferred to spend much more time on the track, regardless of whether it was wet or dry.
José Bermejo (ESP), too, had to do quite a bit of maintenance work on his MAN, before he could think of taking to the track. And also Team Crozier had to carry out their full workload before the senior, Noël, and his son Hervé could climb behind the wheel on the second day. And there was also the Spanish Navarra Truck Team, although according to hearsay Javier Mariezcurrena will possibly not take part in all the rounds of the ETRC season.
Furthermore, it was said that probably five teams will register for the Team Championship 2011.
On this occasion FIA Technical Delegate Ross Garrett called for a meeting in order to answer questions regarding the new tyre regulations. And it was also explained that the top-ten pilots who have to take part in the “tyre lottery” must always be the ones who are classified nos. 1 to 10 in the overall standing at the time of the beginning of a race weekend. For the opening round of the season in Donington the final table of the previous season will be applied.
Later, in a short conservation, Garrett said that he believed that there could be some misunderstandings at the beginning, but he did not think that there might arise any problem or question which could not be cleared up or answered.