Friday in Valencia

24. April 2015Valencia - The first practice sessions of the season today on the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Cheste westward of València threw up the first comparisons between competitors in the 2015 FIA European Truck Racing Championship. They were preceded by an hour of taxi rides for the press. On Thursday afternoon Antonio Albacete (ESP) in his MAN and David Vršecký (CZE) in his Buggyra Freightliner had created no small stir at a PR event in València.
Ten of the full-season FIA pilots will start here, and they were the only ones that drove the journalists around the track and then took part in the hour of free practice thereafter. The tankpool24 Mercedes team with German drivers Roland Rehfeld and André Kursim had drawn their joker for the season-opener - after all, the MB Motorsport team is known to have planned to race at only eight rounds.
Of course not everyone has played his (or her) hand, as evident from the wide differences in track times. But it was predictably the top five from last season – Norbert Kiss (HUN), Jochen Hahn (GER), and Albacete (all MAN) and the two Czechs Vršecký and Adam Lacko (Buggyra Freightliner) – that set the pace under a radiant sun with temperatures at 25°C.
We’ll probably have to wait for first qualifying and the ensuing SuperPole before a clearer picture of the actual strengths of each race truck emerges.

Impressions: