Zolder Preliminary Report

17. September 2014Down the years, one pilot has been the cynosure at the truck races in Zolder: local hero Jean-Pierre Blaise. And so it is at the seventh round of the 2014 FIA European Championship as well. The man from Malmedy, 100 km southeast of Zolder, may not have been a regular feature this season, having had to share one of the Lion MANs with Spaniard Javier Mariezcurrena, but you can’t miss the posters of his yellow No. 20 truck hanging outside houses and on billboards wherever you look in the entire province of Limburg, and especially around the arrondissement of Hasselt. In the races themselves you can expect the usual suspects on the podium, although Blaise has been a regular Top 10 finisher here.
A total of 23 trucks are registered for this round — in addition to the 20 full-season participants the starters will include MAN driver Jérémy Robineau (FRA), Mathew Summerfield (GBR), and Artur Ardavichus (KAZ). With five drivers, male and female, the largest contingent will be German. The races here are very popular among German truckrace fans, not just because the circuit is only 75 km from the border but – especially – because the campsite is situated right infield.
So you can consider this a home event not only for Blaise but also for Jochen Hahn, the German truck racer of the moment. The MAN pilot’s real feelings for this circuit are at best ambivalent, not only because he and his father Konrad experienced their worst mishaps here. In 2002 Jochen was involved in one of the most spectacular accidents in truck racing that sent his truck somersaulting. The Swabian walked away from it with only a broken pair of glasses.
In 2006 Hahn was the leader coming into Zolder. Everybody expected him to be crowned champion, but his Mercedes-Benz was plagued with glitches, including turbochargers that just wouldn’t go the distance, reducing his haul here to just 12 points. He was duly overtaken by Spaniard Antonio Albacete, who went on to win the championship.
In following years his closest competitors were usually a step ahead after Zolder - even in 2011, the year Hahn won the first of his three championships. (He managed just six points, but then he’d come to Zolder with a massive cushion of almost 80 points!)
This year it’s been quite tight at the top. Albacete presently leads with 261 points. Hahn is at 249, with MAN colleague Kiss just three points behind. The Hungarian was the top scorer in Zolder last year. And he needn’t fear that his OXXO team will repeat their mistake from Most, where they forgot to consider that, because of the extremely low tyre pressures he was running, the truck was riding closer to the ground than the rules allow - the weather forecast in any case is cheerful. And we all know that when Kiss starts from the front, he usually finishes up there too.
If Hahn had his black weekend in Navarra, Kiss had his in Most and Albacete his (or a rather grey outing at any rate) in Misano. The question is, are there more fatal knocks in prospect for any of the top three as the season enters its final third, or will it go down to the wire in Le Mans?

Impressions: