33 and 55 taken, 77 still available
05. April 2015Fans of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship will immediately be arrested by this headline. The two Czech Buggyra drivers David Vršecký and Adam Lacko will start with their favourite racing numbers 33 and 55.
MAN pilot René Reinert’s ‘77’ is now free for the taking. For the first season since he’s been a part of the FIA ETRC, the German will not have the No. 77 on his truck.
In actual fact the ‘77’ was somewhat of an alternative. Most Germans consider the number ‘7’ to be lucky, and so too René Reinert. The FIA rules for the ETRC moreover stipulate that the trucks that finished the previous season in positions 1 through 10 carry the corresponding racing numbers.
The ‘7’ would have gone to Reinert’s compatriot and MAN colleague Uwe Nittel in 2012, the year Reinert first raced in the ETRC, but Nittel did not race in 2012 and the ‘7’ went unused.
In his first two seasons Reinert finished 12th and 9th respectively, and could therefore race with ‘77’ in 2013 and 2014. Last year, coincidentally, he finished seventh in the final ranking, and will thus go into the 2015 season with his duly «earned» ‘7’.
“Schnapszahlen”, numbers with repeated digits, called repdigits in mathematics, have been extraordinarily popular in the motorsports fraternity, even before Lewis Hamilton sparked off the hype with his ‘44’.
Last year in the FIA ETRC, Frenchman Anthony Janiec had the ‘11’, Portuguese Renault driver José Sousa the ‘22’, and the two pilots of the Lion team – Steffi Halm and Artur Ardavichus – ‘44’ and ‘66’ on their MAN race trucks. In this manner every number till ‘88’ and ‘99’ was taken.
Janiec starts this year with No. 8; the three others haven’t registered for this season.
The ‘11’ will be Portuguese Eduardo Rodrigues’ racing number, but the six remaining repdigits remain available should any of the drivers still want them.
And lest it should irritate anybody that we‘ve devoted so much text to this topic, be it noted that such numbers have an altogether special significance for those as steeped in the culture of Cologne as we unabashedly are.
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