Friday in Misano

25. May 2018The weather here at the Misano World Circuit on the official start day of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship was as glorious as you can imagine in this classic holiday region on Italy’s Adriatic coast at this time of year. There had been thunderstorms in the days leading up to the weekend – the weather here can change very rapidly, – but the forecasts for the weekend are bright and everyone is now hoping that they will hold.
Just as balmy as the weather were the truck racers’ first laid-back laps in the early afternoon ferrying VIPs and the press around the track on the taxi rides. The primary object here is the pleasure of the media representatives and team sponsors – these rides, after all, serve to spark interest in, and kindle enthusiasm for, this very special motorsport discipline.
The supplementary free practice session, a thank-you to racers who drive those guests, started at 17:00. This provides teams an additional opportunity to optimise the setups on their trucks.
Even assuming that none of the teams or drivers was revealing their cards, the action out on track now turned considerably more serious. The lap times, and the classification moreover, were rather curious. Quickest by some margin was quadruple champion Jochen Hahn (GER) in his brand new Iveco. In second place, somewhat surprisingly, was Englishman Ryan Smith (MAN). Trailing them by over a second were the two Germans Steffi Halm (Iveco) and Sascha Lenz (MAN), tankpool24 Mercedes ace Norbert Kiss (HUN), and the two other Iveco pilots Gerd Körber and André Kursim (both GER) – all those you’d imagine were Hahn’s stronger adversaries. Defending champ Adam Lacko (Buggyra Freightliner) was only 8th fastest, a good second and a half down on Hahn. The young Czech, however, is suffering the unexpected aftereffects of a routine medical procedure – which explains his apparent lack of competitiveness. But it also puts a fat question mark on the times of all the others. Who’s to tell which – if any at all – took risks and wrung the last drops of performance out of his or her truck? Indeed,
everything will likely look very different tomorrow afternoon after qualifying and the Super Pole.
Later in the evening it was time for the next large “project” – the group photography session with all the teams, pilots, and trucks on the pit straight.