Most This And That

11. September 2016Hungaroring and Autodrom Most - the first of the 2016 FIA European Truck Racing Championship’s doubleheader weeks. There was deep concern for Frankie Vojtíšek in the days between the two events.
The consequences of the Czech veteran’s crash in Hungary were rather severe. Many who’d seen the state his MAN race truck was in doubted it could be restored to race-readiness in time for Frankie’s home round.
In the event, the machine rolled out resplendent at the head of the parade into the Most town square on Friday afternoon - but without Vojtíšek at the wheel.
A couple of days after the accident he’d developed a hematoma on his leg that made driving a car impossible, forget racing a truck.
Fresh off the trauma, the MAN pilot had at the Hungaroring itself swapped his racing suit for a mechanic’s overalls and thrown himself into his team’s rebuilding effort. The aftereffects, therefore, were more than a little alarming.
The teams’ discomfort with the scheduling of rounds on consecutive weeks has mostly had to do with the shortage of time for repair should the worst come to the worst. The fitness of the racer after such a crash hasn’t been an equally critical consideration - till now.
The fact is the race trucks are, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – their enormous masses way in excess of five tonnes, extremely safe for their drivers.
One of the factors trotted out as justification for such tight scheduling is the reduced expense for the teams. This conveniently ignores the unhappy memory from the 2006 season, when the truck race circus was forced to travel 1,800 km from Italy’s Adriatic coast to the interior of Spain in less than three days. Nobody – none of the teams at any rate – could see any sense in that. Whatever might have been saved in that transcontinental run, costs most definitely weren’t.
By contrast the now customary Jarama–Le-Mans combination does actually make a lot of sense for the teams logistically. Those from Central and Eastern Europe in particular don’t save only money, but also – since Le Mans isn’t that far out of the way on their journey home from Spain – quite a bit of time.
Two separate trips to Madrid and Le Mans would take up much more time and effort than the “tour”.
Be that as it may, what’s clearly evident in such trying situations as we experienced last fortnight is that the truck racing “family” is just that - a mutually supportive community that you won’t find in any other international motorsport series.
In rebuilding his racing machine Frankie had the wholehearted support of a number of competing teams. Some of them put their hands to installing the drive axle, others helped out with the cabling and the electronics, and so on.
A couple of years ago, when Antonio Albacete’s MAN was caught in a smash-up in Jarama, and the effort to get his truck fit to race again in Le Mans was clearly overstretching the Lutz Bernau crew – one of the most professional outfits in motorsport, – Team Robineau, whose workshops are situated a few kilometres from Circuit Bugatti, promptly stepped in to the rescue.
When it comes to the crunch, solidarity and helpfulness have never been in short supply.
And, lest we forget, it was racing that everyone was in Most for.
Once again, it was the two leading contenders for the championship who were the biggest points-scorers. Jochen Hahn (GER) and local hero Adam Lacko (Buggyra Freightliner) both took 51, and the suspense continues to build.
There was some criticism to go round after Saturday’s first race. In particular, Lacko’s attacks on Hahn were seen by many as quite hard, and some decisions of the stewards didn’t go down well with everyone involved.
For some of the racers and spectators, the draconian penalties for overspeeding were out of all proportion to the “warnings” that were, if at all, issued for patently dangerous driving. This was the subject of open debate.
But while there are clearly defined, objective guidelines set out in the regulations concerning overspeeding that leave absolutely no wiggle room, deciding whether a style of driving is “dangerous” is more a question of interpretation by the individual who is ruling on the matter.
So the racers have taken the initiative to have it out among themselves, and among themselves alone, once for all.
To conclude, a few brief remarks on our own behalf. Quite a few of our readers wanted to know why the schedule of events at Most suddenly disappeared from truckracing.de / truckrace.info. Here’s our explanation: the timetable was revised so many times during the weekend that we just couldn’t keep up with the changes. To avoid confusion, we did the easy thing and pulled the programme from this Website, even though we know how popular they are — some, indeed, have been downloaded more than 20,000 times!

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