Saturday at Smolenskring – Part 2

28. July 2012Smolenskring - Only 12 trucks competed in the first race of the day, Lvov and Kiss did not even position themselves in the starting grid due to technical problems.
Polesetter Albacete took the lead right away and Hahn followed him closely. Behind them was a greater gap and then Oestreich, Bösiger and Lacko as well as Vrsecky followed. Eventually, the group of six drove over the finish line in the same order they had started into the race. Mäkinen and Lacheze fought over the 7th place. Afterwards the Frenchman had to go through the pit lane and eventually placed 9th even behind Reinert. Vojtisek placed 10th ahead of Egorov and Bermejo. But again these were not the final results. Due to overspeed, Oestreich received 10 penalty seconds, placed 6th behind Bösiger, Lacko and Vrsecky and Voijtisek even got disqualified. Reinert placed 8th and had therefore received the Pole position for the second race of the day, where the first eight drivers start into the race in reverse order.
To everybodies surprise two formation laps took place. Some observers assumed that the right order had not been kept at all times. Then the start worked out and Reinert immediately took on the lead. One of the big winners of the first lap was Albacete who gained ground right away. Hahn, on the other hand, was one of the big losers, who had to go through the gravel at the beginning of the race. That’s how the Spaniard eventually placed 3rd while his biggest rival in the Championship had to be satisfied with the 7th place.
However, until then many exciting situations occurred and in the end the race was even stopped.
First of all Mäkinen tried to take over the lead from the front runner, while he was constantly under attack himself. Reinert then even managed to break away from the others. Mäkinen then found himself on the side of the race track and on the 9th place.
Then the ones chasing him tried to attack him. At this point all the drivers had come really close to each other, the first 9 drivers were only 5 seconds apart. It seemed to be only a matter of time until the truckrace rookie would have to give up his position. However, catching up on Reinert and then passing him as well were two totally different tasks.
Then everything happened extremely fast: First Bösiger had a turbo burst. Whole parts of the race track seemed to be covered in white smoke, and in the end it even looked like as if the MKR-Renault was on fire. An old fire-fighting vehicle drove onto the race track and the yellow flags were being waved immediately. The drivers managed three more laps until only a few hundred meters away from where Bösiger’s truck was sitting in the grass, an accident happened. Vrsecky had put constant pressure on Reinert, but then had to yield to Albacete. After the Czech made a little mistake, Oestreich took his chance. The MKR-Renault and the Buggyra-Freigtliner came out of the curve right next to each other, shortly before the yellow flags were being waved at the Marshall station. It was simply too tight for two trucks. The trucks bumped into each other and Oeses Renault was lifted up, twirled and crashed into the tire wall and the guardrail. The driver from Fulda managed to get back into the race, but the race commission had already decided to stop the race.
There were numerous car components spread over the whole race track and oil and coolant, which was leaking onto the track, made it impossible to keep racing. Oestreich came to a halt later because coolant was gushing out of several leads of his truck. They took the results from the finishing line before the accident took place and that was when not only Reinert was having the lead but also Vrsecky was on the 2nd position ahead of Albacete and Oestreich. Lacko placed 5th ahead of Lacheze, Hahn, Mäkinen, Lvov, Egorov, Bermejo and Vojtisek. Then there were protests, protracted investigation and hearings. At some point they said that Lacheze had received a 30 second penalty due to a collision with Hahn and Lacheze therefore fell back on the 10th place. Albacete has the lead in the overall ranking with 302 points ahead of Hahn (301), Lacko (199), Oestreich (196), Vrsecky (176) and Bösiger (144).

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