With combined forces into the new season

05. March 2014There’s just four weeks to go for the customary pre-season tests by the MAN teams in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship. This will be the last opportunity they have before the start of the season to find out what they still need to improve on their trucks in time for the first race. This year’s tests take place in Jarama, on the challenging circuit at the gates of the Spanish capital Madrid. Some of the Renault teams, meanwhile, are expected to gather almost concurrently at Nogaro in the south of France for one final test session. All the teams have heaps of work ahead of them, and we’re now beginning to see greater levels of cooperation than we’ve ever seen before.
As we write this, the Scania race truck of Dutchman Erwin Kleinnagelvoort is being worked on in the Black Forest workshops of Team Hahn Racing. The Dutch truckrace warhorse has won a legendary reputation as a Go & Stop specialist at the Nürburgring, but with his rather ancient piece of race machinery Kleinnagelvoort, the die-hard Scania fan that he is, has had to make do with a string of last-place finishes in recent seasons. European champion Jochen Hahn and his team have taken it upon themselves to turn his fortunes around. The first thing on their agenda is a couple of structural enhancements. It could well be that Kleinnagelvoort hits the track with a more powerful MAN race engine, a distinct possibility under the rules now that Scania and MAN both belong to the Volkswagen Group.
New liaisons have emerged among the Renault teams too. The Paris-based Portuguese VTR team and Team 14, from Département Calvados (No. 14), one of three “departments” in the Lower Normandy administrative region in the north of France, have announced they will work together very closely. The two are connected not only by the fact that they will be racing MKR Renaults from last season, but also the Portuguese nationality of their drivers — Jose Fernandes Teodosio at VTR and José Rodrigues at Team 14, the latter succeeding Anthony Janiec.
Janiec in turn wants to race for an all-new French MAN team consisting of maybe two trucks, as we reported on January 24 — and just who will occupy the second cockpit promises to be a sensational revelation. Things are starting to happen in truck racing!
René Reinert’s team too is in the midst of intense deliberation whether to field a second MAN, and who in the event the driver should be. It’s no secret that the successful Lusatian businessman has added to his fleet the truck with which the Finn Mika Mäkinen beat him to eighth place in the rankings last year. The hottest favourite for the second cockpit at Reinert Racing is apparently another very successful businessman who can boast a long and very successful racing career.

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