Luhr / Klasen win in brilliant autumn weather

The 35th DMV 250-Meilen Race was marked by bright sunshine, exciting racing action and interesting numbers games. Arno Klasen (Karlshausen/ Germany) and Lucas Luhr (Switzerland) scored their second consecutive victory on this golden day in October. The ninth round of the VLN endurance racing championship at the Nürburgring was classified in two parts due to an interruption of the race. In the addition of the two parts, Chris Mamerow (Castrop-Rauxel/ Germany) and Armin Hahne (Wimbach/ Germany) became second with a gap of 4.524 seconds. In third place finished Sabine Schmitz and Klaus Abbelen (both from Barweiler/ Germany) in another Porsche 911 GT3 R. A preliminary decision has been taken in the fight about the championship. The Black-Falcon driver trio of Carsten Knechtges (Mayen/ Germany), Manuel Metzger (Rickenbach-Hütten/ Germany) and Tim Scheerbarth (Dormagen/ Germany) scored their seventh class win with the BMW Z4 and are thus practically uncatchable in the championship lead. A 30 minutes summary of the race will be broadcasted in channel Sport 1 on 19th of October at 17:30hrs.

The 35th DMV 250-Meilen Race was interrupted after 79 minutes. “At this moment, several accidents had happened, independently of each other, and all of the safety intervention vehicles were out on the track”, says Peter Bröcher (Olpe/ Germany), clerk of the course. “In order to ensure full safety, we decided to stop the race.” The re-start was given at 14:57hrs and the racing distance was fixed at 2:20 hours.

In the timed practice, Mamerow and Hahne had gained pole position with a fantastic time of 8:11.006 minutes. After the first part of the race, the driver duo was shown into first place with an advance of 2.857 seconds. Mamerow then lost some valuable time in the second part so that Luhr managed to take the chequered flag into first place. “A big compliment to the Manthey team as, after the shifting problems in qualifying, they changed the gearbox at record speed until the start of the race,” said Luhr. “We have taken the start from grid position 21 and won the race – fantastic. I had to push very hard in the final stage of the race to defend my position towards Chris.” Mamerow admitted: “That was Russian roulette today with all the yellow sectors on the track. In one particular situation towards the end of the race, Lucas was more lucky than me when I lost too much time.”

Colourful mixture of makes behind the top three
Marc Basseng (Leutenbach/ Germany), Frank Stippler (Bad Münstereifel/ Germany) and Christopher Mies (Heiligenhaus/ Germany) came in fourth in the Audi R8 LMS entered by Phoenix-Racing, followed by Alexandros Margaritis (Greece) and Dominik Schwager (Munich) in their BMW Alpina B6 GT3 of the team Dörr-Motorsport. Ralf Schall (Dornstadt/ Germany) and Andrii Lebed (Ukraine) finished in sixth place with the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 entered by Black Falcon. The top 10 were completed by Martin Ragginger (Austria) and Sebastian Asch (Ammerbuch/ Germany) in a Falken-Porsche, Sean Paul and Patrick Breslin (both from Ireland) in the second Black-Falcon-gullwing race car, Georg Weiss (Monschau/ Germany), Oliver Kainz (Kottenheim/ Germany) and Michael Jacobs (Roetgen-Rott/ Germany) in the Wochenspiegel-Porsche as well as Wolfgang Kohler (Aldingen/ Germany), Frank Kräling (Winterberg/ Germany) and Christian Menzel (Kelberg/ Germany) in the fastest Cup-Porsche.

Preliminary decision in the championship
A preliminary decision in the fight about the title in the VLN endurance racing championship Nürburgring has been taken. Three of the four potential championship winners were out of luck at the ninth race. Maik Rosenberg (Attendorn/ Germany) suffered technical problems in his Volkswagen Scirocco of the team LMS Engineering soon after the start. Jannik Olivo and Elmar Jurek (both from Berlin) had to retire after a collision which was not their fault and for Markus Schmickler (Bad Neuenahr/Ahrweiler/ Germany) and Lars Heisel (Bielefeld/ Germany) in a BMW 325, too, the race was over after 17 laps. The Black-Falcon Juniors Knechtges, Metzger and Scheerbarth are thus practically uncatchable in the championship lead. Under normal circumstances, the driver trio will symbolically receive start number one in two weeks time. They could only loose their title if they were excluded at the tenth and last round. It is not eligible to score an exclusion as one of the two results which are not considered for the final championship classification.

The finale of the Nürburgring VLN endurance racing championship season will take place on 29th October. The 36th DMV Münsterlandpokal will run over the usual distance of four hours.