Spielberg Preliminary Report
13. May 2015Spielberg - The teams in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship will shortly enter the first of four 14-day “endurance runs” of the 2015 season — we’re referring to pairs of successive events on the calendar that are separated by just a week, which really means the teams are on the go for at least two weeks at a stretch.
It’s no wonder, then, that some of the smaller teams, and many of the race-by-race pilots, have had to choose one event from each of these pairs to take part in. The round at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria, will feature 16 drivers; Czech solitary MAN Frankie Vojtíšek had to pull out because of mechanical problems with his truck.
The driver who’s certain to get the loudest cheers here is home hero Markus Altenstrasser. Like last year, the Austrian will start for the Schwabentruck Iveco team from Ulm. Altenstrasser is racing only at selected rounds, like teammate Gerd Körber, who put up a very strong showing in testing at the autodrome in Most in March. The German thrice-champ and his team have made it their mission to be right up there in Spielberg as well.
Another German race-by-race pilot, Sascha Lenz, will return to ETRC action after a few years. In his absence he has raced together with his father Heinz-Werner in the Holland Cup series on occasion, and even in the British championship. In the winter break the junior Lenz bought an MAN from the defunct Janiec Racing Team. Anthony Janiec is, as we all know, driving a French Lion MAN this season.
Englishman Ryan Smith will also race in Spielberg, in an MAN acquired from Jochen Hahn. Smith, presently second in Division 1 in the 2015 BTRA Championship, also plans to race a few more rounds in Europe.
The tankpool24 Mercedes team will start its season in Spielberg with the two German drivers Roland Rehfeld and André Kursim. The independent team sources parts for its race trucks from all over the world, sometimes from the other end – and we mean it literally – of the planet. This takes time, involving as it does various customs formalities. At the start of the season in Valencia the team still hadn’t received parts they needed — stuck in customs.
And so it was touch and go for this bunch of passionate Mercedes enthusiasts, getting the two trucks ready for Spielberg. The 2nd tankpool24 truck will be put to its first serious test in the one-hour bonus free practice session for those trucks that ferry journalists on the taxi rides on Friday.
Dutch Scania pilot Erwin Kleinnagelvoort is the sole full-season participant who won’t be racing here. All the rest will be back in action, led by the Top 5 — the three MAN drivers Norbert Kiss (HUN), Jochen Hahn (GER), and Antonio Albacete (ESP), and the two Czechs David Vršecký and Adam Lacko in Buggyra-Freightliners.
But as Hahn’s compatriot and MAN colleague René Reinert has already shown, none of these five has any divine right to the podium. For their part, the organisers at the Red Bull Ring might have done well to secure some fair-weather rights from the heavens. The distinctly unpleasant weather prospects notwithstanding, fans around the circuit are in for a feast of truck racing. The races are all of equal length; and the ETRC loop of the Red Bull Ring being the shortest on the calendar, the action will last 20 laps of instead of 12 or 13 at every circuit else.
Even otherwise, it’s never really boring for a visitor here; attractions aplenty await in the paddock and in the team and sponsor marquees.
There’s one other point in which the FIA ETRC won’t be outdone — not by Formula 1 at any rate. The evening before the Truck Race Trophy 2015, the Red Bull Ring will feature Australian cult band AC/DC live in concert. Eat your heart out Formula 1!
Impressions:
