Mid-season recap
27. August 2013We were actually halfway through this year’s FIA European Truck Racing Championship with the Truck Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, which was the fifth round, but there’s only been a significant break in the schedule between the rounds at Smolensk and Most. The teams had no time after the TGP either to recover or to make any improvements, but the gap of five weeks following the race in Russia has given the truck racers space for more than just a holiday. MAN, for one, can look ahead to the rest of the season relaxed, given its dominant position. Four trucks in the top five — we certainly couldn’t have foreseen that at the start of the season. Mario Kress, the most successful race engineer and team manager in the paddock with 10 titles to his credit at Buggyra and MKR-Renault, will be sure to redouble his efforts. His drivers Adam Lacko (CZE) and Markus Bösiger (SUI) are sixth and seventh, a good 130 and 140 points respectively behind the Spanish championship leader Antonio Albacete (MAN). Sure, there remain 240 points up for grabs, but they still have four more pilots ahead of them, even should the Spaniard weaken substantially in the last four races. It’s going to be very difficult for Lacko and Bösiger to repeat their third- and sixth-place standings from last year.
Even in the team championship, the title defenders appear to have missed the bus — MKR are now almost 200 points behind the leaders, Truck Sport Lutz Bernau (Albacete / Oestreich – MAN), and a good 100 behind second-placed Castrol Team Hahn Racing (Hahn / Mäkinen – MAN). This time Kress will most probably have to settle for third place in the final standings. The fact is that no other top team has been visited by so much misfortune as MKR. Lacko and Bösiger have at least six times each dropped out, or fallen so far back as to have no chance of challenging for points. The tragic climax of this dark season so far was the first race in Nogaro, when both Renaults were so badly damaged in the same accident, for which neither was responsible, that their day was over then and there. A one-two in the last race of the weekend was no consolation.
Pictures of Bösiger and Lacko on the top step of the podium – and each has been there thrice – are nice for the record, but they certainly haven’t satiated Mario Kress’s thirst for victory. The German team boss who lives in the Czech Republic will definitely have used the interval to work on improving his team’s competitiveness. One only hopes that MKR’s stream of bad fortune is well and truly over and that Kress won’t have to bring to mind German football pro Jürgen Wegmann’s memorable remark: “To begin with we had no luck, and then we had misfortune to add to it.”
German title defender Jochen Hahn has, by contrast, only stood twice at the top of the podium, albeit both times following a day’s first race, which brings with it double points. He’s also finished second on six occasions and third on three, and lies around 100 points ahead of the two MKR pilots. A comparison to the seven race wins of Albacete, which brought the championship leader 140 points in all, shows that consistency is decisive — despite many more wins, the Spaniard has only 17 points more in his account than Hahn in second place.
Around 40 points behind Hahn lies his compatriot and MAN colleague Markus Oestreich. He has in the Czech David Vršecký (Buggyra Freightliner) and the Hungarian Norbert Kiss (MAN) a strong duo of pursuers that are determined to snatch third place from the German come what may. At any rate, these two drivers have been the surprise package of the season. While many secretly tipped Kiss, who’s driving Hahn’s championship-winning truck of last year, for the title even before the season started, nobody could have reckoned with the strong showing by two-time European champion and thrice team champion Vršecký. His Freightliner, not exactly the newest of the new, dates back to Mario Kress’s time at Buggyra. While it has been upgraded to meet the latest regulations, the development potential in this championship-winning truck of a few years ago has long been exhausted.
And so, four race weekends before the close of the season, it looks like MAN has it all in the bag — both, the driver’s and the team championships. The only questions that remain are, Albacete or Hahn? and Truck Sport Lutz Bernau or Castrol Team Hahn Racing?
The top task for Buggyra and MKR thus remains to rain on the MAN parade as often as possible. And they’ve got the best opportunity to do that at the next race in Most, the Czech Republic. Both teams are based close by and both use the Autodrom Most as their permanent test track. Buggyra and MKR have always held the trumps on this circuit.
Impressions:
