Jarama Preliminary Report
02. October 2013On Tuesday we had an entry list for the 9th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, not in the usual FIA format but in the colours of the organiser’s and of the Circuito del Jarama at the gates of Madrid. The document was indeed dated 1.10.2013, but a closer examination of the margin revealed that the list was last updated on 24.09.2013. And last Tuesday nobody even at the FIA had any inkling of the sensational developments to come. After all, it’s not every day that someone shifts to another team two races before the end of the season. Ellen Lohr officially announced her switch from tankpool24 to Buggyra only on Sunday afternoon, and the FIA had been informed only a few days before that. So the entry list in our hands naturally doesn’t account for German André Kursim, the new driver of the tankpool24 Mercedes whose inclusion will only enrich the already high-powered field of starters.
As our readers will be aware, the races in Jarama form a part of the Spanish national truck racing championship. In June we had seven additional participants, all of them racing in the national championship, and even more will be joining the action in Jarama. So we are going to have 31 trucks at the start, the largest field at any race so far this season. The extremely exuberant fans will be out in hordes, rooting for their idol Antonio Albacete. Truck racing has an exalted significance here — for both, the media and the motorsport-mad Spaniards. Almost all the Cepsa fuel stations are decked out with posters and placards of Albacete and his red MAN. Every child here knows the madrilène matador, and he in turn knows his home track like the back of his hand. The burden of expectations is correspondingly heavy, because every Spaniard is counting on Albacete to massively extend his present lead of 21 points. After all, there’s a good 60 points up for grabs this weekend.
German defending champ Jochen Hahn is the outsider here, even though he hasn’t done too badly on this extremely challenging circuit in the past. But the intense pressure on Albacete could hand his fiercest rival for the 2013 championship the advantage. In any case the focus is going to be on the battle between Hahn’s green-and-white Castrol MAN and Albacete’s bright red Cepsa MAN, though two other MAN pilots, Markus Oestreich (GER) and Norbert Kiss (HUN), still do have a mathematical chance of winning the title — as does the Czech David Vršecký (Buggyra Freightliner).
But the fans in what’s probably the most spectacular sequence of corners in truck racing, where the stands – when they are not packed so full – look like scaffolds, will already be looking forward to Sunday afternoon. That’s when, in what’s become a rite here for some years now, Albacete flings his helmet into the crowds of his ecstatic devotees.
Impressions:
