mathilda racing: TCR-Seat advances despite retirement

After the successful start of mathilda racing with the Seat Leon Cup Racer at the 24h Race – TCR class win and 33rd overall position – the racing team from Cologne has during the past weeks been focused all of their attention to the VLN again. “We keep on developing the car continuously for its participation in class SP3T”, team manager Michael Paatz says. And they are reasonably successful: None of their competitors in class SP3T was able to stop the car in the fifth VLN race and the team scored the first class win of a TCR car in the VLN. The Leon Cup Racer showed a very good performance again in the sixth round, but it didn’t make it to the finish.

The closest rivals for mathilda racing drivers Andreas Gülden, Matthias Wasel and Teamchef Paatz this season in their class are the Audi TT-RS 2.0 of Håkon Schjærin, Atle Gulbrandsen and Kenneth Østvold as well as of Heinz Schmersal, Moritz Oestreich and Markus Oestreich. All of the three cars were dominating the first part of the sixth race again and their lap times were separated by only a few tenth of a second. Their battle was decided after a little more than three hours’ race distance due to a technical failure: First of all, the Audi of Schmersal/Oestreich/Oestreich had to retire and only little later, the Seat, too, stopped due to a lack of drive.

Michael Paatz was nevertheless happy: “I would never have though that we might be able to go the pace of the Audi TT-RS. We are happy to have demonstrated now several times that a genuine TCR car can be very competitive in class SP3T despite a lower engine power and less propulsion.”