Zolder This and That

26. September 2013The spectacular crash in the first race of the weekend at Zolder was the dominant theme at the eighth round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship. Fortunately no serious injury resulted, but the crash left a lot of steel and plastic debris strewn across the track, and a restraining wall along the pit straight that was smashed through in several places. These images are a sober reminder of the enormous forces that a 5.5 tonne race truck thundering along the track at the maximum 160 km/h can transfer on impact. In order to acquire the same momentum a Formula 1 car, for example, would need to be travelling at around 485 km/h down the narrow straight at Zolder — a speed beyond even an F1 pilot’s ability to handle. Every few years there are renewed discussions about whether to raise the FIA ETRC’s present speed limit to 180 or even 200 km/h. The 1,150PS race trucks would have absolutely no difficulty doing these speeds — after the rolling start they don’t take 5 seconds to touch 160, and at the end of the 500m-long straight it would be child’s play for a truck racer to go much faster even.
But then the momentum of the trucks, and the energy it took to brake them, would rise proportionately. Staying with the Formula 1 comparison, from the perspective of kinetic energy an increase of 40 km/h in the speed of a race truck would correspond to a surge of more than 120 km/h in an F1 car. A Sebastian Vettel would then need to tear down the narrow Zolder straight, hemmed in by walls to the left and right, at 610 km/h!
Only a couple of circuits on which the FIA ETRC is held can boast a safety standard that would allow any higher speed limit than the 160 km/h that obtains at present. On the other hand, the accident showed once more how safe our race trucks today really are. The Swiss Markus Bösiger suffered no injury at all; the day after, he won the last race in a replacement MKR Renault that was brought in from the team’s Czech HQ overnight.
But the OXXO team couldn’t rustle up a replacement MAN for their Hungarian youngster Benedek Major that quickly. And maybe that was a good thing too, because it allowed Major to recover somewhat from the shock of the crash — and a sore foot that caused him to hobble. Otherwise, Benedek was in the best of shape.
What else was there to report? In Friday’s free practice Ellen Lohr shocked her fans and Mercedes-Benz well-wishers with her lap times. Now we all know that, despite its sharp looks, her race truck is long in the tooth and just not powerful enough to be a frontrunner anymore. But the Grande Dame of truck racing appeared for all intents to be “sauntering” around the track more than 20 seconds slower than her competitors on the leaderboard. Drivers whom the German otherwise leaves well behind her were now lapping at up to 15 seconds faster than the Mercedes. But then tankpool24 boss Markus Bauer clarified. The team was running a completely rebuilt engine and, following the disaster in Most, where two engines seized one after another, they were taking no chances with this one. The little private team – with no factory support of any kind – doesn’t have a dyno to test its engines on and break them in, unlike the factory-supplied MAN and Renault teams and even Buggyra. The engine had to be run in cautiously on the track itself. But in the races we saw a completely different Ellen Lohr — with two 11th-place finishes she was only barely out of the points.
The final Sunday report on truckracing.de / truckrace.info was already up when the official spectator count was released: 12.000. Last year all we had on the Sunday evening was an estimate — between 10,000 and 12,000. A disappointing figure at first glance, but rather normal for Zolder, with its sparse stands and the narrow, stretched out paddock. In the past we’ve seen up to 30,000 fans here, which has led to near-stampede situations when there was no more getting in. Moreover, the Belgian circuit is one of the very few at which the tickets are not only checked at the entrance to the grounds, but also scanned into the system. So the figure released only reflects the number of scanned tickets. But many visitors and fans that actually stay on the massive premises (this includes not only the paddock but also the camping grounds) throughout the weekend might be checked in on entry, but their tickets aren’t scanned, and so these visitor numbers don’t appear on the official count.
And to conclude, something that all the photographers found rather unpleasant. Each accredited lensman was given a map of the circuit marked with red danger zones, areas that are out of bounds during the races. These zones are, obviously, equally dangerous for the marshals, clad in fluorescent orange as they might be. But many of the men in orange were least interested to know, even when it was pointed out to them by the photographers. Some of the marshals stood in the chicane at the end of the back straight in front of the tyre barrier, and so smack in the sights of the photographers, who had been banished to several metres behind the barriers. All hints to them to move were met with infuriating incomprehension.
To everyone who’s seen the videos of the spectacular crash mentioned above on our Facebook page – and there’ve been 400,000 views till now, Thursday evening, – it should be apparent just how narrowly the men in orange escaped disaster in the first impact of Bösiger’s Renault with the wall. Of course, the entire zone along the wall was a red zone.

Impressions: