Will Quadder / Kniesburges go down in history?

The crew of Karsten Quadder (Solingen) and Stefan Kniesburges (Pulheim) may well go down in the VLN history at the fourth round of the VLN endurance racing championship Nürburgring, the 45th Adenauer ADAC simfy-Trophy. For the third year now, the driver duo of the team TIC-Racing will compete in a Ford Focus ST in class VT2 (VLN production cars up to 1600 cc cubic capacity with turbo) and they can look down onto a continuous series of class wins throughout the last twelve races. They are missing only one more successful result to equalize the performance of the current record holders Dirk Adorf (Michelbach) and Harald Thönnes (Mülheim-Kärlich) who succeeded in scoring an amazing row of 13 successive victories in the years 1996/1997 and 1999/2000.

“That’ll be a race just like any other”, says Quadder. “Our car is perfectly prepared and we will start the race with a clear head.” Kniesburges is well aware that the record attempt cannot be taken for granted. “Everything needs to run perfectly to finish first in our class. But we will definitely try our best to win again.” Also the fact that the TIC-Racing team – and this not without any reason – relies on the production version of their car is no guarantee for success. “A standard car already is very sophisticated“, says Quadder, who, like his colleagues, is involved in the motor industry. “The manufacturers nowadays invest a lot of resources in the development before a new car is released. They are meanwhile very sophisticated, latest procedures and methods make the models really reliable. In a competition, however, you always need that little bit of luck as a lot of things can happen throughout four hours racing.”

An interesting side issue is that the said Harald Thönnes will be one of the direct competitors of Quadder/ Kniesburges. Together with Bernd Hömberg (Plettenberg/ Germany) and Marcel Hoppe (Lennestadt/ Germany), he will have a class VT2 Audi TTS on the starting grid. With only one more Opel Astra GTC entered in their class, the number of competitors is rather low. “We are really surprised about that”, says Kniesburges. “The automotive industry currently fully focuses on downsizing with turbo engines. And that was last but not least a reason for us, too, to start in this class when the Focus was introduced to the market at that time. There is number of other cars which would be eligible in our class – Audi S3, Mitsubishi Lancer, Volkswagen Golf, BMW 1er, to give a few examples only. We hope this will change in the near future as we would definitely be happy to have a bigger competition in our class.”

The 45th Adenauer ADAC simfy-Trophy will start on Saturday, the 17th May, at 12 o’clock exactly to run over the race duration of four hours. The positions on the starting grid will be established based on the results in the timed practice taking place previously between 08:30 and 10:00hrs.