2011- Short summary
25. January 2012This past season the Truck Racing Organization, TRO, which had just been founded the year before, presented itself to a wider public and also worked on some organizational tasks. Almost all truck racers and their teams, as well as, some of the big sponsors are organized in the TRO. Up until then truck racing in Europe (after all the most popular FIA motor sports series in Europe after the Formula 1) only had the FIA on the one hand and the organizers on the other. The FIA acted more like a chief supervisor regarding the rights of the product “Truck Racing Championship” and was also in charge of the racing rules and technical specifications. The rest was pretty much in the hands of each national organizer. The only common body of all people in the truck racing business was the Truck Race Commission. For people from outside the truck racing business, there was no general contact person, nor an organization, in which the drivers, teams or sponsors saw themselves represented by. TRO chairman Fabien Calvet – who also serves as an FIA delegate – and his team are on their way to eliminating this flaw, in order to accomplish something in the truck racing business with the TRO, which has already become a standard in other motorsport series.
Jochen Hahn, the German MAN-driver, became the new European champion and not only his fans thought that he deserved it. His opponents also gladly granted him the win – since they didn’t win themselves.
From the beginning of the season in Donington to the final race in Le Mans, there had consistently been extremely risky and spectacular situations, which not only ruffled feathers, but led some people to make some imprudent statements, which were occasionally accompanied by accusations.
This had rarely been the case before, as the atmosphere, in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, in particular, is normally quite friendly. Some official decisions, which not everyone was able to understand, didn’t really help steady the nerves.
Egon Allgäuer sold his truck racing equipment to France. The Champion from 2002 and two-time runners-up had spoken of such intentions in the past, because in the end truck racing in Europe didn’t exactly correspond to his visions anymore.
Last season a truck racing-video-platform “www.truckrace.tv” was put online for the first time. In only 8 months around 150,000 visitors watched more than half a million videos. Despite this enormous success, the maintenance of the website is problematic. First of all it’s questionable whether we will have these kinds of videos in 2012. Moreover, this website was made by the people responsible, in addition to their normal activities at the speedway. The information websites “www.truckracing.de / www.truckrace.info” on the European Truck Racing Championship turned out to be extremely successful last year. More than 20 million people (to be exact: 20,055,928) visited this website, a 28% increase over the previous year. Visitors from over 100 different nations regularly read the truck racing news. Those are usually the other countries besides Germany where truck races are held or where the drivers and teams come from. However, people from countries that have no direct relation to the European Truck Racing Championship have become more interested, such as the U.S.A. with almost 20% of the page impressions and China with 8% in December.
Impressions:
