Zolder This And That
24. September 2016Has the breakdown of Adam Lacko’s Buggyra while leading the first Sunday race at Circuit Zolder pretty much decided the outcome of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship? The Gyrtech engine already sounded off-key the lap before it packed it in, bringing the Fatfox to a full stop.
Jochen Hahn, Lacko’s only real rival for the title, won the race handily, stretching his lead over the Czech by 20 points at one blow. He now has an advantage of 35.
The podium for that race was, as it turned out, an all-Hahn affair. All three trucks are handcrafted by the Hahn workshops, and at such a historic moment the team’s founder and chief Konny just had to be a part of the celebration.
MAN pilot Jochen had been absolutely consistent through the weekend, winning the previous day’s important 20-points race as well, and Buggyra was under considerable pressure not to let the German get away.
And while the MAN-powered contingent aren’t allowed to tweak the performance of their engines at will, the self-sufficient crew at Buggyra have no such constraint. Sure enough, Lacko & Co were back with a bang in Sunday’s second race - the Freightliner simply flew around the track.
The team will surely have been relieved that the problem was “only” with an injector; their sole swing engine had already been shoehorned into Jiří Forman’s truck the evening before.
So there was Lacko, right at the end of the grid for the final race. But he took off like a bull untamed and, after a fast and furious drive, was flagged the winner. Hahn, by contrast, chose a measured, wait-and-see pace. Finishing second, only a point behind, ensured that Lacko’s epic essay wasn’t materially significant.
If you look at it, though, Lacko’s loss hasn’t really changed the situation very much with 120 points still up for grabs. Hahn conceded as much, before he made off early in the evening headed homeward. The German MAN pilot knows better than anybody just how quickly a lead believed to be unassailable can actually vanish.
That’s the thought that was probably turning around in his mind at the IAA in Hanover, even as he went about his PR engagements for primary backer Knorr-Bremse and other sponsors.
But Hahn wasn’t the only one to leave Zolder far earlier than usual. Another part of his team, the crew responsible for René Reinert’s truck, also departed in extraordinary haste. As soon as the MAN-in-blue was made presentable again for marketing eyes, they too hit the highway headed for Hanover. There the Reinert truck, in the livery of the Lusatian logistics magnate’s large fleet, is one of the biggest draws. It isn’t the only race truck on display at the IAA, of course; the tankpool24 Mercedes and Schwabentruck Iveco are two of the other stars, which also notably include MKR Racing’s Renault offroad truck for the Dakar.
This biennial trade show, the world’s largest for the commercial vehicle business, comes at a particularly inopportune time for the participants in the FIA ETRC, right before the championship-deciding weekends.
The tankpool24 team has built a separate show truck for such events, Schwabentruck has passed up the Jarama round just to be at the IAA, and the Reinert MAN will be loaded onto its carrier at the end of what promises to be a very well-attended weekend and driven directly to Spain, even if the show has four more days to go thereafter.
That’s because Reinert cannot afford another weekend without points. He’d pulled out of the event at the Hungaroring with a heavy heart, if just to honour business commitments that had cropped up. The MAN pilot had intended to cement his hard-won 3rd place in the standings; instead he fell back once again. Good results in Most and Zolder have helped him retake 3rd, but:
The race for that spot has actually turned out to be far more competitive than the title fight. The German is a mere point ahead of Hungarian defending champ Norbert Kiss in the tankpool24 Mercedes. Kiss meanwhile has Reinert’s protégée Steffi Halm snapping at his heels, and she in turn has her MAN colleague Anthony Janiec breathing down her neck.
All of 11 points separate Reinert from Janiec. We’ve never seen such a close pack at this stage, and we can already feel in our bones the tension build.
Impressions:
