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Le Mans Preliminary Report

Le Mans Preliminary Report

08. October 2015Le Mans - The 10th round at the storied Circuit Bugatti in Le Mans in the heart of France rings the curtain down on the 2015 season of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship. This is the first season in ages that the title has already been decided before the final event. But even if Hungarian Norbert Kiss is the manifest champion, it’s going to be anything but boring at Le Mans - if what we saw at Jarama is anything to go by. Thrice European champion Jochen Hahn, who also incidentally has a hand in Kiss’s two titles – the Hungarian actually drives the Hahn Racing MAN in which the German won his last title in 2013, – is determined to finish second in the standings, come what may. He was runner-up last year too.
Only one point behind lurks Czech Adam Lacko in a Buggyra Freightliner. The most recent races have shown that the new points scheme – as many points for the handicap race as for the first – incentivises tactical racing, and the Buggyra team is at a natural advantage here with two trucks.
The full-season pilots will be out in strength, and even the tankpool24 team will have both its Mercedes trucks in the fray. The only driver who’s missing is Portuguese MAN pilot Eduardo Rodrigues, who’s still wheelchair-bound after he broke a leg in the summer. Rodrigues was there in person at Jarama to cheer his son José on, the junior Rodrigues a race-by-race entrant in his Renault. In Le Mans he’ll be driving in the races for the French championship, in which he still has a shot at the title.
The field of 16 here includes not a few race-by-race pilots. For the first time this season we’ll see Finn Mika Mäkinen, not in an MAN but driving an Iveco. His will be the second Iveco in the field, besides the Schwabentruck of “Mr Truckracing” Gerd Körber (GER), the official standard-bearer for the marque.
That privilege brings with it a burden of expectation, but he won’t be able to achieve much against the overwhelming superiority of the MAN phalanx. The sextet of full-season MAN drivers is supplemented by three race-by-race colleagues, the two Germans Steffi Halm and Sascha Lenz, and Czech past master Frankie Vojtíšek.
Le Mans will be a total contrast to Jarama. The programme in Spain was laid-back, but at Circuit Bugatti there’s scarcely a moment to catch one’s breath. The organisers here pack more into two days than most of the three-day events offer. The action begins at 8:30 every morning, and now that we’re almost in mid-October, that means barely 20 minutes past sunrise. The Saturday night pop concert will have folks dancing till dawn.
Before that the fans will already have witnessed four truck races – including the finale of the French championship – plus four practice and two qualifying sessions, not to mention the races from the supporting programme. When dusk falls it’s time for the parade of the decorated trucks, followed by a floodlit extravaganza by the mechanics and powerdrifters on the pit straight. Then there’s the huge fireworks before the concert can begin.
Sunday’s action begins likewise at 8:30, and the whole business only gets over in the wee hours of Monday.
The races are followed by the official FIA prizegiving ceremony hosted by the TRO, which goes on till midnight. Then there’s the season-ending party and the winners’ celebrations in the paddock that will last till... only they know when.
Starting so early at this late time of year has in the past created scheduling difficulties for the organisers - and on occasion necessitated one or the other event to be cancelled when the temperatures were close to freezing and the track was simply too dangerous to race on.
There’s no fear of that happening this time. The forecast is so good as it hasn’t been in years.
If we’ve now managed to whet your appetite for an experience this grandiose, and the opportunity to taste the thunder of these 1,100hp beasts of the FIA ETRC for the last time this year, you must get up and going. A weekend ticket costs €39 (€34 if bought in advance), inclusive of access to the grandstand, the paddock, and all the other attractions.

Impressions:

Le Mans Preliminary Report
Le Mans Preliminary Report