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Exit Markus, enter Ellen

Exit Markus, enter Ellen

26. February 2015We were - we must admit- taken aback by the revelation that truck racing’s Grande Dame Ellen Lohr (GER) is going to be driving Bernau’s “No. 2” MAN in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship this year. We’d already reported that Spaniard Antonio Albacete now owns the “No. 1” Bernau-MAN.
Truck Sport Bernau was last season’s champion team with Albacete and Markus Bösiger (SUI). All his track successes notwithstanding, the Swiss 2007 European champ has of late appeared to have a little bit tired of truck racing. The fact is Bösiger has built himself a small empire in Switzerland with interests that include passenger-car and tyre dealerships, real estate, gastronomy, and sports facilities. A few years ago, moreover, television broadcaster Schweiz 5 set up its studios at Bösiger’s headquarters in Langenthal.
As his businesses expanded, the time they allowed this passionate motorsports enthusiast to dedicate to track pursuits shrank accordingly. Bösiger isn’t one of those “gentleman pilots” who need only cast one short glance at the circuit before they get behind the wheel and then don’t want any more bother. He’d always prepare meticulously, often testing to the point of exhaustion. After all, he’d been well and truly “infected” by the truckrace virus way back when - in 1999, to be precise.
Bösiger came into truck racing off a successful career as in sidecar road racing. After three equally successful seasons in the SuperRaceTrucks category he withdrew for two years, before David Atkins fetched him back to the Race Trucks in 2005. The next year Bösiger switched to Buggyra, became champion there in 2007, and then followed Mario Kress to the newly established MKR Renault team in 2010. With the exit of MKR at the end of 2013 he joined Truck Sport Bernau for the 2014 season.
Now it’s true his cockpit is going to be taken by Ellen Lohr, but it would surprise nobody if the name Markus Bösiger should once again pop up on the list of starters at the FIA ETRC very shortly. Once infected by the truckrace virus…
But that’s true of Ellen Lohr too, a ambassadress for Mercedes Benz Classic. The only lady to have won a race in the DTM (Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft), the German touring-car championship, Lohr actually joined the ranks of the truck racers two years before Bösiger. In 1997 and ’98 she drove a factory SuperRaceTruck for the Stuttgart-based manufacturer with the three-pointed star. Since then she has driven pretty much everything that moves on four wheels - on the racetrack and in the Dakar Rally too.
In 2012 Markus Bauer of the tankpool24 Mercedes-Benz team managed to lure Lohr back to the 5½-tonners on six wheels. Last year she partnered her French colleague Anthony Janiec in the JRT MAN team.
Now that Janiec is going to be racing for the French Lion team, Lohr too had to start off anew. In the coming season, she declares, she’s going to devote herself to defending - with Albacete - Truck Sport Bernau’s team title.

Impressions:

Exit Markus, enter Ellen
Exit Markus, enter Ellen
Exit Markus, enter Ellen