Jochen Hahn’s wishes for the coming season

15. February 2018Jochen Hahn, the current runner-up in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, has – on the face of it – only one, rather modest wish. And that is to improve his standing by a single position. That would make the quadruple champion only the second truck racer after the legendary Brit Steve Parrish to have won five titles.
The German Iveco pilot evidently has no intention of hanging up his gloves - which means he could, indeed, set a new record altogether. But getting there is going to be a long, hard slog.
The first steps in that direction were taken immediately after the finale of the 2017 season, when the Team Hahn workshops in Egenhausen near Altensteig got down to building an all-new Iveco race truck. Although Hahn himself has been distracted by a number of PR and marketing engagements over the winter, the new truck is inexorably nearing completion - all thanks to his reliable, intensely coordinated crew.
The “beauty treatments”, i.e. painting and stickering, should be over by end-March in time for the first shakedowns on the Iveco Magirus oval in Ulm. Then, scheduled for third-week April, are the test days at Autodrom Most in the Czech Republic, a Hahn Racing initiative that has become a pre-season routine for some of the top teams over the years. It’s a unique opportunity for them to test their trucks for the upcoming season against the competition in race-identical conditions.
Some of the other teams have already promised to participate, and we could see as many as 10 trucks in Most this year. They will be paying assiduous attention to the electronic timers, especially when the competitors are tearing up tarmac. After all, every team is keen to know as clearly as possible where it stands on performance relative to the rest.