Friday at the Red Bull Ring

04. July 2014Spielberg - The fourth round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship at the Red Bull Ring in Austria is a three-day event. For the participating teams, though, it kicked off on Thursday itself with a reception on the terrace over the pits. That, of course, was pure leisure. Today it was down to work rather early, with the warm-up for the taxi rides at 8:30. Everybody had a whale of a good time, but it was only during the one-hour practice session after the noon break when the drivers could really let it rip. And they went about it with gusto, in brilliant summer weather and temperatures at around 28°C. The young German driver Steffi Halm did 30 laps and would have kept going if it wasn’t for a rather lengthy interruption called to the racers that the orange penalty markers should not be touched.
The MAN drivers Antonio Albacete (ESP), Norbert Kiss (HUN), Jochen Hahn (GER), and Markus Bösiger (SUI) once again set the pace, recording times within three-tenths of one another. It was a similar story in the first free practice session, except that Gerd Körber (GER) in his Iveco managed to wedge himself into the MAN quartet. The second free practice ended shortly before the start of the World Cup soccer game between Germany and France, but that could hardly have been the reason for the somewhat shorter lap times. At the end it was Kiss who drove the fastest lap with a 1:05.326s, and the day ended as expected with the aforementioned MANler at the top.
But what we saw today was still only shadowboxing; the real serious battles will start to build up tomorrow morning with the first qualifying session and the SuperPole that follows it.

Impressions: