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David Jenkins wins third T1 Prima race challenge

David Jenkins wins third T1 Prima race challenge

23. March 2016The third T1 Prima truck race challenge at the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida outside the Indian capital New Delhi threw up some robust racing, but was poorer nevertheless for the exclusion of Stuart Oliver, champion of the first two editions of the event, and Steve Thomas and Steven Powell, first and second runner-up last year.
Be that as it may, David Jenkins was a deserving winner of the gruelling 37-minutes-plus main race run over 20 laps in unpleasantly warm – for the Britishers – Indian spring weather. Despite the fact that none of the drivers had done 20 laps at one go in any of the prior sessions, the trucks all held up very well. The Brits, though, used as they are to 15-minute scraps in the BTRA events, were washed out.
Jenkins, driving his third straight “season” for Tata Technologies Motorsports, went into the race in fourth but finished more than 19 seconds ahead of Rick Collett (Team Cummins), who’d started alongside him on the grid in third. Polesitter Mathew Summerfield of Team Castrol Vecton dropped to fourth during the first lap and managed to fight his way back up to second by the 10th lap before spinning off and eventually finishing the race eighth.
Graham Powell (Team Cummins) held the lead for five laps till, in the fourth corner of this five-bend loop of the Buddh International, he ceded it to a determined Jenkins. The man-in-blue briefly ran wide in the final hairpin but managed to stay in front going into the sixth lap.
Rick Collett, who’d dropped to fifth for a couple of laps, was back in fourth going into the seventh lap. (Collett had set a new lap record of 1:50.650 in the qualifying heat for Sunday’s finale, beating his own record of 1:50.840s set in a free practice session last year.) On the 10th lap, Cummins teammate Powell momentarily retook the lead before spinning in turn 3. That was the opportunity Jenkins took to seize the lead, which he held onto till the chequered flag.
Matt Summerfield meanwhile set the fastest lap of the race, a 1:50.691 in the eighth lap, but the effort was of no consequence. A couple of laps later the gap at the top was 4.7 seconds, but it was Rick Collett now in second. By the 11th lap Ben Horne for Team Dealer Warriors had stolen up from sixth to third, and was running in second a few laps later, ahead of the two Cummins trucks. But try as he might, he just couldn’t pull away from the two, who finally managed to subdue him and overtake on the back straight on the penultimate lap.
The Sunday also featured the first Indian truck racers, a group of 12 highway truckers that survived Tata’s intensive inaugural T1 racer training programme (TRP) conducted in southern metropolis Chennai and at the Buddh Circuit over five weeks in January and March. The company canvassed 41 of its major customers Indiawide in December 2015 and received more than 500 entries, out of which 132 were selected for the TRP after a detailed skill analysis by consulting company Accenture.
The Indian rookies, divided into two batches, were allocated six of the (rebuilt) trucks that had been driven by the British drivers last year, trucks that themselves were rebuilt from the trucks that raced in the inaugural 2014 season. Truck number 4 was the winning machine in both races, first in the hands of Jagat Singh of Mercurio Pallia Logistics, the Indian affiliate of the French GEFCO group, and later Nagarjuna A. of Shekar Logistics, one of Tata’s leading customers for the Prima in the south of India.
Tata insists that there were no changes to the engine and gearbox/axle ratios from 2015, and so, with lower-profile tyres this year, it stands to reason that the trucks should have been slower than last year’s. However, race-tuned shock absorbers and an anti-roll bar at the rear, plus a weight reduction of more than 500 kilos and a centre of gravity lowered by 10 cm, seem to have more than compensated for that in terms of top speed — despite the fact that Tata specified front wheels with flatter mounting face offsets (127mm), moving the tyres further apart on the front axles. (Together with an increased camber angle, designed originally with the 175mm-offset wheels, this actually slowed the trucks down in the corners.)
And while company officials maintained that all 18 trucks that ran in Sunday’s races were equal in every respect and “remarkably consistent”, truckracing.de learns that the six older trucks driven by the Indian racers were speed-restricted to 137-odd km/h, whereas the 12 driven by the British racers were regulated at 145 km/h (compared to 135 km/h in 2015).

Text & Photos: Eliot Lobo / TATA

Impressions:

David Jenkins wins third T1 Prima race challenge
David Jenkins wins third T1 Prima race challenge
David Jenkins wins third T1 Prima race challenge
David Jenkins wins third T1 Prima race challenge