Robineau reigns in Le Castellet
20. May 2018Le Castellet - Sunday’s races were blessed by an abundance of sunshine and temperatures touching 25°C. The historic Circuit Paul Ricard is situated only a few kilometres from the Mediterranean at an elevation of 500 metres – and the weather can change very rapidly indeed.
Clouds kept gathering, some of them as black as sin, but that didn’t spoil the party for the truck racers and the 39,500 fans in attendance.
Thomas Robineau was quickest in qualifying, but his MAN colleague Anthony Janiec stepped up a notch in the Super Pole to capture first place on the grid for Race 3. Lionel Montagne snapped up third, reversing the situation yesterday, when
Téo Calvet in his Lion MAN started in that position.
Polesitter Janiec took the lead and pulled out a gap, so that after two laps it looked like a win was in the bag. But then the yellow-and-black MAN with competition number 1 suddenly slowed, allowing competitor after competitor to overtake. Janiec crawled towards the pits, but in the final curve the MAN simply drove straight off and came to a halt in the runoff, a few hundred metres from the pit exit.
The steering had ceased to function – the servo pump had, evidently, given up the ghost. While Janiec initially was, with much effort, able to wrestle his truck around the corners, the loss of servo assistance finally made the truck impossible to steer.
Robineau thus got his third victory of the weekend pretty much handed to him.
Youngster Calvet, meanwhile, overtook Montagne in the early laps and drove unchallenged to second. The Renault pilot then had to make way for his Polish colleague Grzegorz Ostaszewski and make do with 4th.
Janiec started the final race of the weekend from 16th. His upset over the misfortune in the earlier race propelled him inexorably up the ranks. After just one lap he was already in third place, right behind Robineau, who’d started from 8th.
Florian Orsini had the first-lap lead, the only one remaining of the front-row starters. Even he couldn’t enjoy the clear view ahead of him for much longer than that. The two MAN pilots simply swept ahead of the black Mercedes. But effortless though Janiec’s forward thrust may have been, the Lion MAN was now finding it impossible to subdue Robineau. There was nothing the defending champ could do but settle for second place, and Robineau walked away with all the spoils this weekend.
Orsini, in 3rd for two-thirds of the race, was overcome by Ostaszewski, the Pole securing his second 3rd-place finish of the weekend. In the final laps Orsini was also passed by Montagne and Calvet, leaving him to cross the finish line a desolate 6th.
Impressions:
