Thursday, 28.03.2024 | Deutsch | English
A week of tests

A week of tests

18. April 2017The deadline for registrations for the 2017 season passed last week – four weeks before the first round of the European Truck Racing Championship, in accordance with the rules. The official entry list will be released by mid-week.
The teams are slowly getting into gear, preparing for their first pre-season tests at Autodrom Most in Czechia and the two Coupe de France Camions circuits in Albi and Nogaro.
The test days in Most, a Jochen-Hahn-led initiative as in recent years, will run till Thursday. Team Hahn Racing and Team Schwabentruck, the other Iveco flagbearer, are neighbours in the Most paddock and the entire truck racing world is waiting with eager anticipation for the first big appearance together of the two German Iveco pilots, Hahn and Gerd Körber.
Never has Iveco prepared so intensively and so meticulously for a truck racing season – understandable considering everything about the two Iveco race trucks is brand new. To be sure, they have done a few laps of Iveco’s proving ground in Ulm, but there were no spectators allowed then. Hahn and Körber won’t be able to play their cards so close to their chests in Most, but then again nobody’s really going to be giving anything away – not Iveco; not Buggyra and their Czech driver Adam Lacko; not MAN showcase Truck Sport Lutz Bernau, to which Spanish ex-champ Antonio Albacete returns after a gap of two years; and certainly not the MB-Motorsport-powered tankpool24 team, whose Mercedes trucks will once again be raced by Hungarian double-champ Norbert Kiss, and his youthful German colleague André Kursim.
Even as the teams in the FIA ETRC do their thing in Most, some of the drivers and trucks registered for the French championship will test at Albi and Nogaro on Wednesday. The French season kicks off on the very weekend the trucks in the ETRC take part in their first competition of 2017 in Spielberg, Austria.