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Stuart Oliver wins India’s first ever truck race

Stuart Oliver wins India’s first ever truck race

24. March 2014The 12 trucks in India’s first ever race event survived with no serious damage, but just enough contact-related blemishes to excite a curious public, and there were more than 22,000 of them at the Buddh Circuit in Greater Noida on Sunday. All 12 trucks in the race were supposedly identical in every respect (although one of the drivers reckoned that the trucks of at least two teams had a clear performance advantage down the pit and back straights) — except for the fact that the end result looked very much like the finish of an FIA ETRC race.
The grid for Sunday’s championship race was decided by a five-lap sprint race, the starting positions for the sprint having been determined on Saturday afternoon in a five-lap heat. Ben Horne, Division 2 runner-up in the British championship in 2013, took top spot in that race driving for Team Dealer Warriors with a lap of 1:58.574. He was followed by Dave Jenkins (Tata Technologies Motorsports), Mathew Summerfield (Team Cummins), and Stuart Oliver (Team Castrol Vecton) with a gap of less than 1.5 seconds.
The sprint itself was started on a cool and overcast day, with a few drops of rain rather reminiscent of the weather at the Nürburgring during the TGP. But the track stayed dry, so any element of uncertainty that would have added thrill to the action was – disappointingly – missing. Horne came off rather the worse for the rush to the first corner, having been knocked into the gravel while trying to defend his position from Stuart Oliver, who had shot alongside into the very first corner. Stuart went on to take pole position with a lap of 2:01.274s, a good 2½ seconds slower than his pace in the previous day’s heat (pun intended).
Ben Horne, meanwhile, was only able to rejoin the race at the rear of the field and finished more than 26 seconds behind the leader — despite setting what eventually turned out to be the quickest time of the weekend with a blistering lap of 1:58.214s. His father Steve Horne is the man responsible for helping Tata develop the trucks to a specification he deemed adequate for the 2.5km truncated section of the Buddh Circuit, the maximum length of which was taken up by the pit and back straights. As a consequence of this layout choice, according to Mathew Summerfield, any mistake by a driver would be impossible to recover from during the race given that all the trucks were (supposed to be) identical.
Mathew Summerfield, meanwhile, dropped a place to fourth, ceding position to David Ball, who made a rapid advance up the field from ninth to finish third with a time of 2:01.585s, a good second slower than his prequalifying lap the previous day.
In the main “championship” race, Stuart Oliver took a determined victory for Team Castrol Vecton. Victory for the seasoned British racer was anything but certain after the first lap, when he lost his lead into the first corner to Mathew Summerfield (Team Cummins) and then was dumped into third by David Jenkins (Tata Technologies Motorsports). In his determination to catch up, Oliver set the fastest lap of the race in the fourth lap with a 1:58.227, Jenkins meanwhile had caught up to Mat Summerfield and the gap between the two was just 0.436s for most of the fifth lap.
In the sixth lap, however, Stuart Oliver had moved back into second when David Jenkins ran wide at the last corner leading into the main straight, and was rapidly closing the gap to Mat Summerfield. In the very next lap he had reeled in his compatriot and overtaken him to recapture the lead, which he then proceeded to stretch to 5.051s by the penultimate lap before Summerfield shaved that somewhat to 4.674s at the end of the 15-lap race.
Down the field, meanwhile, Ben Horne had forcefully moved up to sixth in the sixth lap before he fell back to 11th before fighting back to finish ninth.
Three teams on the podium (Castrol, Cummins, and Tata Technologies Motorsports) was probably the best result that Tata and all its collaborators on this historic inaugural truck race could have hoped for. The fact that the trucks were of a far lower performance level than the BTRA contingent are used to, and that all the drivers trod rather gingerly during the sprint race for fear of damaging the trucks (which Tata intends to use as marketing props throughout the year), hampered what could have been more eventful racing. And John Felix, the FIA-appointed race director, suggested to www.truckracing.de / www.truckrace.info he would have preferred a format with two races, one of 10 laps followed by one of 15 with a reverse grid for the second, as that would have made for a better spectacle.
Tata, nevertheless will benefit immensely from the learnings from the T1 Prima race, which the organisers, the drivers, and everybody else evidently all enjoyed immensely. Having demonstrated to the world that a truck race can be successfully held in India, the sport will now appeal to the entire industry and grow in scale and stature in years to come. Meanwhile, at least one of the drivers, who also builds his own race trucks single-handedly, is very keen to take a couple of Tata Prima trucks back to the UK and rebuild them with more powerful Cummins engines for entry into the European championship.
Who’d have thought?

Eliot Lobo

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Stuart Oliver wins India’s first ever truck race