Sponsor event features race truck, a Moto2 bike, and a TCR racer

17. August 2018The seven weeks between the 4th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship at the Slovakia Ring and the 5th at Autodrom Most have been a drought of sorts for most of us truck racing fans. Last year the summer gap was a week shorter, though in 2016 we had to go for eight long weeks without action.
All this time the truck racers have remained busy, be it with tweaks and tests or other commitments generally. Motorsport, let’s not forget, is fundamentally a capital-intensive endeavour, from karting all the way up to Formula 1 – irrespective of the variety of dimensions involved.
As in every other series, nothing in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship moves without money from sponsors, and sponsors today require more than just their logos on a truck and its driver’s overalls. More than any other sport, a truck racing weekend is first and foremost an on-the-ground spectator event, a perfect occasion for sponsors to invite their customers, business partners, and employees to.
The more well-known pilots also have any number of PR commitments away from the action trackside, and not only during the long summer break. Some of these are to sponsors active across different classes of motorsport. At the end of last year, for example, four-times champion Jochen Hahn featured in a short video promotion titled “Bilstein Legends” alongside rally legend Walter Röhrl and a few other motorsport greats.
This summer too, in addition to a few short-notice obligations, Hahn flew the truck racing flag high at a full-day press event by his sponsor Liqui Moly at Allgäu Airport in Memmingen. The bantam from Altensteig was joined by colleagues from two other series – Moto2 rider Marcel Schrötter, and Luca Engstler from the TCR Germany Touring Car Championship.
Both were mighty impressed with the cockpit of Hahn’s Iveco – “Just like that of an aircraft!” But what floored them was the raw acceleration of the sheer mass of 5.3 tonnes. That is, after all, more than four times as much as Engstler’s TCR machine weighs, and almost 36 times as much as Schrötter’s relatively filigrain race bike.

Impressions: