The truck racers get back to testing at Most

20. April 2016Most - A week and a half before the start of the new season of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship in Spielberg, Austria, a clutch of teams and pilots congregated at Autodrom Most to subject their trucks to a final endurance test.
The early morning temperatures were only barely above zero, reminding many of the race truck left out in the open last year, allowing the biting wind to freeze many of its vitals.
Today too a strong wind swept through the paddock, and even though no technical aids were required to “thaw” the trucks, it still took a while for them to get warm enough to roll.
On the dot of nine, five trucks peeled onto the track - the three MANs of Team Hahn Racing (Jochen Hahn), Reinert Racing (René Reinert), and Truck Sport Bernau (Ellen Lohr) and two Buggyra Freightliners of Adam Lacko and Jiří Forman. Buggyra tester Michal Matějovský, who together with past master David Vršecký and Lacko will turn out in Buggyra colours at a truck race event in China, was also preparing for a stint out.
After the sun had climbed a bit, the air began to warm somewhat, and the temperature was in the double digits by noon. But it felt nowhere near as warm as the thermometer suggested.
The chill seemed to have no effect on the engineers and mechanics, none of whom had time to bother about the weather anyway. Of course nobody was 100 percent satisfied with the setups they’d achieved - if they were, they said with a smile, they’d have packed up and left by now.
Some of the trucks indeed appeared to be displaying serious problems that in retrospect turned out to have actually been trivial. One had something wrong with its steering gear, but that was nothing more serious than a seal that had packed up. Another had gearbox problems, and when after a thorough inspection the service crew was about to replace the entire unit, they finally discovered the freak cause - a bolt from the track that the tyres had picked up and slingshotted right into the box.
In both cases precautions will be taken to prevent like occurrences in the races.
As in the previous test days here, everybody was still holding their cards very close to their chests. And so we’ll only be able to judge after qualification on the Saturday in Spielberg where the trucks and racers really stand relative to one another.

Impressions: