What’s going on inside: Overspeeding at race start

17. August 2016Every fan of truck racing knows that the 160 km/h speed regulation in the FIA European Truck Racing Championship is carved in stone, and for good reason.
The race trucks are capable of much higher speeds, even though each weighs more than five tonnes. David Vršecký demonstrated that already 12 years ago when he touched 282 km/h in a SuperRaceTruck Buggyra - albeit not on a racetrack but in the deserts of Dubai, where there was nothing in miles the Czech could have mown down even if he’d wanted to.
But Markus Bösiger’s spectacular impact with the wall along the pit straight right at the start of the first race at Zolder three years ago graphically brought home just how much momentum these colossi gather. Translated into Formula 1 terms, the force on impact would be what – God forbid – Hamilton, Rosberg & Co would experience at 480 km/h.
That’s why the FIA has such stringent rules to prevent overspeeding in the ETRC.
In days long gone, enforcing the speed limit meant having to rely on the tacho discs, which had to be manually read after the race. In recent years the use of GPS technology has allowed race officials to monitor speed telemetrically in real time. Any driver who exceeds the limit for longer than 2.75 seconds is awarded a time penalty according to the duration of the transgression. Depending on how often that happens, a driver may even be excluded from the classification.
Exceeding 170 km/h disqualifies the driver instantly.
In Nogaro earlier this year, six pilots were penalised on the Sunday evening after the concluding race - for exceeding the speed limit at the start. Naturally eyebrows were raised, and you could be forgiven for wondering: were the trucks already over 160 km/h when the lights turned green?
Even if a race truck can accelerate ferociously and reach top speed in around five seconds flat, the question here was how fast the trucks were going on the approach to the lights.
The FIA ETRC races, like all truck races, have rolling starts. With such huge masses involved, accelerating from standstill would simply be too dangerous, never mind that the machines have for a couple of seasons been “trimmed” to 5,300 kg. No less crucially, given that a race truck has more than 5,500 Nm of torque on tap (in comparison a 2016 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S with 420 PS puts out 500 Nm), taking a standing start would be asking for catastrophic powertrain failure.
The procedure governing the rolling start is clearly spelt out in the FIA’s rules for the ETRC.
On the formation lap the speed is determined by the pace truck, and must lie between 50 and 70 km/h. After the pace truck has peeled off, everyone has to fall in line with the polesitter - till the lights turn green and the racers hear on their headphones their teammates at the pit wall roar “GO,GO,GO!!!”
That’s when they can finally give their 1,200-plus horses free rein.
Till that time they must be careful not to exceed 70 km/h - or drop below 50 km/h.
In Nogaro it was six at one blow, as it were. Six drivers who, in their impatience, took their eyes off their tachometers and simply followed the herd.
According to the rules, all the transgressors should have been handed a drive-through penalty. That would have required them to take a diversion through pit lane, without stopping and, obviously, without exceeding the speed limit that obtains there, which is usually 60 km/h.
But race control in Nogaro took its time to digest what it had just seen - it was, after all, six trucks, some of them way over the limit and the fastest caught at 83.9 km/h! It decided to review the data for the six racers in peace after the race was over.
Jochen Hahn and Adam Lacko, the first two in the day’s first race, had started from the fourth row of the reversed grid, and didn’t let the overexuberance of the six starters ahead get the better of them. The German and the Czech stuck firmly to the 70 km/h limit, to the manifest benefit of all those who started behind them.
At the Truck Grand Prix on the Nürburgring, Dutch Scania pilot Erwin Kleinnagelvoort was still revelling in his completely unexpected 4th place in Nogaro, and candidly admitted: "I’m happy I was behind Jochen, or I’d have gotten carried away with those up ahead because I too only had my eyes on them and not on the tacho. I wondered at the time why Jochen and Adam had let such a big gap open up in front of them... After the race I knew."