Czech Truck Prix in Most kick-starts second half of the season

28. August 2019Truck racing fans will have gone 40 days without a fix when the roar of the 13 litre engines finally returns Friday afternoon at the first free practice session for Round 5 of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, kicking off the second half of the 2019 season. It’s a unique sound that sets the heavy metal apart from the lightweights and their screaming small motors.
As always at this time of year, the echoes will be heard amid the mountains of lignite that emblematise the Czech town of Most, a mining and industrial centre with 70,000 inhabitants just across the German border.
The races at the Autodrom here are also extremely popular with German fans from Saxony, Thuringia, Berlin-Brandenburg, and Bavaria, and the track commentary is traditionally delivered in both Czech and German.
After the long summer break, everyone will be keenly watching how the race officials adjudicate in the second half of the season. At Round 3 in Slovakia we had a novelty in that “track limits” penalties awarded during qualifying were rescinded before the start of a delayed Super Pole, so that – for the first time – 11 trucks took part in the shootout for starting positions on the first five rows of the grid.
No notable penalties were handed out at the next round at the Nürburgring, even though trucks ran outside the edges of the track on more than a few occasions, and even the corner-marker bollards only survived the weekend in severely beat-up condition.
Will the stewards in Most be as magnanimous? Last year we saw them pronounce several sanctions, as in the rainy Super Pole on Saturday. It poured continually that weekend, which certainly didn’t make their job any easier. The overwhelming majority of the forecasts for the coming weekend agree that the weather this weekend is going to be perfect for racing.
Front and centre for the fans will be whether championship leader Jochen Hahn’s most immediate pursuers have in the last six weeks found what it takes to close the yawning gap that separates them from the Iveco pilot. But the team from the Black Forest won’t – yet – countenance the suggestion of a sixth title for their star. Often enough we’ve recounted the story of Hahn’s meltdown 13 years ago. The then up-and-coming Mercedes pilot had a 38-points advantage over Antonio Albacete (MAN) after the first four of nine rounds that season. But then – beginning in Most – the Spaniard rode a wave of wins to take the championship, finishing a huge 55 points ahead of the German, who suffered a string of failures that dumped him to third. Hahn holds a bigger advantage this time (67 points), and Albacete in P2 has one round less to catch up in. The bantam from Altensteig may have won five championships since, but the memory of that fateful season lives on.
Of course, it’s not all about Hahn and Albacete. Home boy Adam Lacko (Buggyra Freightliner) is right up behind the Spaniard, and Autodrom Most is Buggyra’s backyard. Tankpool24 Mercedes pilot Norbert Kiss lies one point below the Czech, and you can never write him off. Germans Steffi Halm (Iveco) and Sascha Lenz (MAN), P5 and P6 in the standings, also have a good chance of finishing the season on the podium at the FIA prizegiving in Jarama.
There’s a biggish 20 entries for this weekend, six of them from Germany alone. The fans from across the border will have much to look forward to.

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