The fourth successive top result of Schrey and Mies

It starts getting a little strange by the time. Now, even after the fourth round of the VLN endurance championship Nürburgring, Alexander Mies and Michael Schrey, competing in the BMW M325i Racing Cup, still have a clean record. The duo of Bonk Motorsport won this fourth VLN race, too, and thus remains unbeaten in their class this season. “I am totally delighted. Our series continued even in these extremely difficult conditions”, said team manager Michael Bonk with great excitement. His crew dominated their class in a way that nobody would have believed previously. In addition to their clean record, the distances to their competitors are furthermore more than impressive. At the end of the race, Schrey and Mies once again had an advantage of almost one minute ahead of the second-placed team. At the fourth VLN race of the season 2016, this second place went to Michael Funke, a solo driver in the Schirmer-BMW. After having caught up brilliantly, the third place was gained by the so far strongest competitors for the two series winners, Thomas Jäger and Rudi Adams in the ‚Eifelblitz’ of the Team Scheid-Honert Motorsport.

The order in the top group was still exactly inverse when the total of 21 competitors in the class took the start in permanent rain and in bad visibility. The ‘Eifelblitz’ had been in the first row of the grid, before Funke and the Bonk-BMW. Start driver Mies, however, attacked right after the start. “Alex has done a brilliant job. He passed the competitors quickly and then pulled away with a comfortable advance”, said Schrey who himself then even increased the team’s advantage. After a perfect performance and 4:12:20 hours race time, the two drivers secured another class win for the team. They thus increased their lead in the Cup classification and in the VLN Championship.

The first metres of the race were running totally different for the ‘Eifelblitz’. In the traffic after the start, Rudi Adams had a collision with some competitors and had to come back to the pits already after completing the Grand-Prix-Circuit. The repair of their car took six minutes so that another top result seemed to be far away. “It as a great shock for us when we saw the start and the collision from the pits. The whole team was deeply disappointed”, said Jäger who then, however, was able to follow the performance of Adams who completed one extremely fast lap after the other. And all of a sudden they were back again in the fight for a position on the podium. When Adams, after his impressive double stint, handed over the car to Jäger, the latter continued to catch up. They finally crossed the finish line with a gap of about 1:23 minutes behind Schrey/Mies. “We never gave up in the race and this podium makes you feel to be the winner. We proved to everybody that in the rain, we have the fastest car of the whole field. I am convinced that we would definitely have won without the accident, so I am really looking forward to the next races”, said Jäger.