Stuart Oliver is T1 Prima champ for the second year in a row
16. March 2015It was a race that had all the hallmarks of a FIA European Truck Racing Championship round — heavy rain, spins, crashes, drive-through and elapsed time penalties, and some close, hard-fought duels. And at the end of it all Stuart Oliver emerged victorious for the second year in a row.
For Team Castrol Vecton’s experienced 2014 champ, victory against Team Allied Partners’ Steve Thomas in Sunday’s 16-lap T1 Prima championship finale at the Buddh International Circuit must have been much sweeter for the fact that he’d just gotten his own back at the relative newcomer for dumping him into fourth in Division 1 of the British Truck Racing Association’s 2014 championship.
Rather unusually for Greater Noida, the weather was what you might expect at the Nürburgring in mid-July — wet, windy, and chill, with light drizzles off and on from the morning. Thomas started the race on pole, having finished the rainy 8-lap qualifier race earlier almost 2 seconds ahead of Oliver, but almost 9 seconds off Rick Collett’s 1:50.840s in free practice Saturday. (That time, a good 8 seconds quicker than the quickest lap last year on the 2.5 km T1 loop of the 5.14 km circuit, now stands as the lap record here for this event.)
But it was Stuart who was into the lead at the first corner in his Castrol-green truck, leaving Thomas to fend off a hard-charging Simon Reid (Team Cummins), who’d started on the second row of the grid in third, as they roared round the curve on the high-speed uphill approach to Turn 2, a blind right-handed hairpin.
They were tailed by Steven Powell (Tata Technologies Motorsports), Collett (Dealer Warriors), and the duo of Mathew Summerfield (Cummins) and David Jenkins (Tata Technologies), last year’s first and second runners-up, and Paul McCumisky for Dealer Daredevils. McCumisky was spun into the barrier on the curve by impatient youngster Oly Janes (Castrol), and the race was prematurely red-flagged, though the veteran was able to turn around and get going again.
The race was then restarted after a delay of 10 minutes with the original grid. This time, while Thomas was able to hold his lead past the first corner, it was Stuart who led into Turn 3 at the end of the 1.3km back straight.
At the beginning of the third lap, exiting the first corner, Jenkins’ rear end swung out and he skidded across the track, hitting the barrier near the spot that McCumisky’s truck had got acquainted with the wall a little earlier. The truck lifted into the air and looked like it would tip over, but thankfully the barrier held up and the powder-blue No. 69 truck came to rest. Jenkins’ race was over, and the yellow flags were out.
Mat Summerfield, meanwhile, had made up three places and was now in third, while his teammate Reid had dropped to sixth, behind Graham Powell and Steve Powell, who had dropped a spot. A little later, he was overtaken by Janes, who promptly picked up a drive-through penalty for making his move in a yellow flag phase.
The battle at the front was fast and furious, Thomas drawing alongside Oliver along the high-speed back straight, Oliver in turn pushing harder to keep his nose ahead by just four-tenths of a second. Seven laps into the race a fired-up Chris Levett (Allied Partners), who’d been called in by the stewards after the earlier heat for running Ben Horne (Dealer Daredevils) into the gravel on the exit of Turn 2 and given a 30s penalty, dropping him to the rear of the start grid, had already forged his way up into fifth.
By Lap 10 the two frontrunners were a razor-thin 0.25s apart, and Steve Powell was into third ahead of Summerfield, who had inexplicably dropped back by more than 4.67s. The next lap Thomas was back in front of Oliver in the first corner, Oliver retaking the lead in the back straight, a lead he resolutely held on to till the finish.
Four laps later the gap between the leading trio and the rest was now a yawning 11s, Summerfield falling into the clutches of his raring teammate Reid and Levett lurking in their lengthening shadows for the first hint of a mistake from either.
Towards the end of the 15th lap Steve Powell was right up behind Thomas, having narrowed the gap to just 1.5s, before attempting to overtake on the final lap, a move that Thomas adroitly parried. By now Chris had barrelled past the Cummins pair ahead of him, finishing the race an amazing fourth.
So it was three different teams once again on the podium, with Stuart Oliver for Team Castrol Vecton, Steve Thomas for Allied Partners, and Steven Powell for Tata Technologies, the junior Powell being the first of the Division 2 drivers from the BTRA to make it into the top three in what’s now planned to grow into a true championship, run over several rounds in a proper “season”, as a Tata Motors officer announced the day before the race.
Report & Photos: Eliot Lobo
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