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Slovakia Ring Preliminary Report

Slovakia Ring Preliminary Report

12. July 2017Slovakiaring - Before the FIA European Truck Racing Championship breaks for six weeks for the summer, it will visit the Slovakia Ring near Bratislava for the 4th round of the 2017 season. After the Truck Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, where Czech Adam Lacko dominated proceedings in his Buggyra Freightliner on a wet track, the other teams have had not much more than a week to figure out how to counter the overwhelming superiority of the Freightliners, put those plans of action into effect, and test them out in race conditions.
Hardly enough, as you can imagine, and so everyone – with the exception of Lacko, of course – is desperately hoping that the weather stays dry.
Fifteen trucks in total have registered. Now that the Mercedes of Frenchman Dominique Orsini is raceworthy again, the full-season complement is complete. Add to that Frankie Vojtíšek (MAN) and the young German pilot Steffen Faas (Iveco) as race-by-race entrants. For Czech old-timer Vojtíšek, racing at the Slovakia Ring is something of a dream come true. And Faas, having had his first taste of blood at the Nürburgring, is likely lusting for more.
The track is an unknown quantity for most of the racers, but not for the two top pilots Lacko and Norbert Kiss. The Buggyra pilot tested here ahead of the start of the season, and even if Kiss hasn’t driven his tankpool24 Mercedes here, his experience with the Slovakia Ring goes back far longer and he knows the track like the back of his hand. This is certainly of advantage, considering that this circuit is radically different from every other on the ETRC calendar. The most prominent difference is its length; the truck races will be run on the longest, 5.922 km variant of this multi-configurable facility. That’s around 50 per cent longer on average than the other ETRC venues, and 2,5 times as long as the Red Bull Ring. What this means is that the race will be of only eight laps, whereas the fans are used to have the trucks thunder past them 11 or 12 times in a race, or 13 at the Nürburgring, and 20 in Spielberg!
If the racers touch the speeds they did at the Nürburgring on a dry track, the lap times should read in the 3:10s; in the wet they could take 3:30 or more. But given the unique layout with extended high-speed stretches that allow the trucks to max out at 160 km/h for longer durations, the times are expected to lie in the 2:40s.
It’s going to be tight in qualifying and the Super Pole. The top-ranked drivers customarily do one hot lap after the obligatory warm-up lap, then ease off for a lap before they step on it again. They’ll probably have to ditch this rhythm at the Slovakia Ring. When the trucks are up to speed, the 10 minutes will suffice only for two flying laps in succession. The countdown begins the moment the lights at the pit exit turn green, so it’s going to be crucial for the racers to line up in advance in the correct order.
The spectators at the Slovakia Ring are in for not only unusual races, but also pairs of pretty peculiar qualifying and Super Pole sessions.