Loud cheers in the Haribo Racing Team, the winners of the 39th RCM DMV Grenzlandrennen: Uwe Alzen took the chequered flag in his Mercedes-AMG GT3 into first position after a race time of 4:00:21.323 hours. He and his team mates Jan Seyffarth and Lance David Arnold thus not only gained the first Mercedes AMG victory in the current VLN season for the German team, they also celebrated the first top position again for the team since the eighth round in the year 2010 when Lucas Luhr and Richard Westbrook won in their Porsche 911 GT3 R with the same striking Haribo gold bear livery. Into places two and three followed the two BMW M6 GT3 of Walkenhorst Motorsport powered by Dunlop. The variety of makes that is present in the top group was underlined by the Falken-Porsche 911 GT3 R and the Audi R8 LMS of Twin Busch Motorsport who finished in positions four and five. Alexander Mies and Michael Schrey defended their championship lead, the driver duo completed the race with another superior class win in the highly competitive Cup5 class (BMW M235i Racing Cup), their sixth victory in a row.
Four hours of exciting racing action in summer temperatures at the most beautiful and demanding race track – a day that all the fans around the 24.358 kilometres long combination of the Nürburgring Grand Prix circuit and the Nordschleife enjoyed with great pleasure. During the 28 race laps, the lead changed not less than nine times. Apart from the race winners and the second placed team with Christian Krognes, Victor Bouveng and Jörg Müller in the Walkenhorst-BMW, the Audi R8 LMS of Phoenix Racing and the Porsche 911 GT3 R of the Wochenspiegel Team Manthey were temporarily found in the race lead. Whilst the Phoenix-Audi had to retire in lap 25 due to technical failure, the Wochenspiegel-Porsche finished eighth.
Uwe Alzen’s advance at the finish was 12.090 seconds ahead of Müller. “Towards the end of the race, we had to look after our fuel consumption as we were not hundred percent sure whether there was enough fuel for an additional lap”, Arnold explained. “But finally we managed to finish with a fantastic victory. The competition in the endurance championship is very close and we had to go ‘all in’ in each lap before we were able to finish the race in a controlled manner.” Alzen added: “Fur sure, I did not want to take any risk. Even if I had to reduce speed a little towards the end, each lap in the ‘Green Hell’ is extremely demanding.”
Krognes/Bouveng/Müller were very happy with their second position. Kronges had gained pole position on Saturday morning in setting a fantastic time of 7:56.642 minutes in the timed practice. This is a new, unofficial lap record; official lap records can only be set in a race. With a time of 8:02.914 minutes, the driver trio furthermore completed the fastest lap in the race. “Even though the BMW M6 GT3 makes its debut this year, it can already do an excellent pace over one lap”, Müller said. “The team is now working hard to maintain this speed over the complete race distance. We’ve made some big steps forward again in this regard, which is impressively demonstrated with our positions two and three.”
