Misano – Preliminary Report

18. May 2011This season it will be the twentieth time that the truck racers meet at Misano on the Adriatic coast – usually in the second half of May and most often in perfect summer weather. And this year we are again going to enjoy sunny conditions. A brilliant blue sky all weekend, temperatures of around 30 degrees and no rain at all. And not least, of all the venues in the truck racing calendar the Misano World Circuit is the track nearest to home for the Austrians, the Swiss and for many southern Germans, so that quite a lot of truck racing fans will mix a short holiday with a trip to the races – or vice versa. There are still enough vacant rooms in the hotels, the beaches are not yet overcrowded, and € 12.00 or € 15.00 for a one-day ticket is certainly in line with almost everybody’s budget. And why not take a quick side trip to San Marino on the way back; for one thing it’s quite beautiful there, and for another thing you can enjoy duty-free shopping.
But apart from all these fantastic amenities – some races will be taking place, too. For the first time this season all the FIA pilots are registered, and in addition a big-name truck racer is going to participate as race-by-race pilot, too.
And people can hardly wait to watch this pilot – namely “Mr. Truck Racing” Gerd Körber – and his Schwabentruck Iveco perform. At the Truck Grand Prix last year the team around Iveco-man Schorsch Glöckler already caused a furore, but at that time it was “only” the Mittelrhein Cup. But in the races of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship the pilots aren’t all that far apart in regard to their performance; and up in the top-ten the air is getting very thin. Even though the performance of the race engine – which has been developed by Jürg Spuler and his team in Arbon / Switzerland – is rated high by several experts, it is still an amateur team that does all the maintenance and developing work in their spare time, but nonetheless they are extremely dedicated and competent people.
Markus Bauer with the MB Motorsport Team and the tankpool24 RaceTruck is in a similar situation. They only work on their Mercedes Benz in their spare time, too – and they have yet another problem: to get a competitive race engine. All the same, the fans – and, of course, the insiders – are curious about the second Swabian RaceTruck, because their pilot is Steffi Halm – who is from Swabia, too – which means there will once again be a lady sitting in the cockpit after a long, long time.
But for the top teams neither Körber nor Halm will certainly pose a real thread – at least not yet in Misano. The full professional teams of Renault, MAN and Buggyra are constantly in search of improvements and not only in their leisure time. In truck racing the pilots meanwhile finish the races by the narrowest of margins, as we could witness at the opening round in Donington / Great Britain. Several of the favourites, the two MAN drivers Antonio Albacete (ESP) and Jochen Hahn (GER), and particularly last year’s vice champion, the Swiss Renault pilot Markus Bösiger, can tell you a thing or two about it. While it wasn’t really a big surprise when the German driver Markus Oestreich (Renault) took the lead in the overall ranking, nobody would have expected his fellow-countryman Uwe Nittel (MAN) to hold 2nd overall in the championship standing. Right from the start of the second truck racing season the former Rally vice world champion left no doubt that he intends to have some say in regard to the podium places.
And that’s what Bösiger plans to do in Misano, too, as he is the only one of those pilots tipped as the next champion who didn’t make it on the podium in Donington. And the circuit on the Adriatic coast in Italy suits him well. His opponents loath to look back upon last year’s round in Misano, when Bösiger – in his brand-new truck and with a new team, plus handicapped by a broken hand – left his rivals eating dust.
So we are now looking forward expectantly to watching the second round of the season. And perhaps the cards will be completely reshuffled this weekend.

Impressions: