Six of the eight rounds in the VLN endurance championship Nürburgring which took place before the recent one all finished with an Aston Martin Vantage V8 victory in class SP10. At the ninth race of the 2016 season then, two extraordinary newcomers appeared at the start. And they celebrated an excellent debut. The two KTM X-Bow GT4 driven by Christopher Haase and Arne Hoffmeister as well as by Johannes and Ferdinand Stuck just moved away from their rivals and celebrated a respectable result also in the overall classification at the end of the four hour race, they finished 16th and 17th.
“That was really cool, fantastic how we all were flying around the track. I hope that the feeling which we had inside the car could also be experienced from the outside by the spectators. The X-Bow is a super-fast car and it is such a huge fun to drive it”, said Hoffmeister who was so happy. Together with his Isert Motorsport team mate Haase, he had already prepared their later success in setting fastest time of their class in the timed practice. They gained pole position with their Nordschleife newcomer, ahead of the Stuck brothers in the sister car entered by the True Racing Team. “Specifically in the rain, it was good to be in the front and thus to avoid a bad visibility in the traffic”, said Haase who completed the first stint on the wet track, yet found in Ferdinand Stuck a competitor who performed equally well.
A preliminary decision in the fight about the class win was however then taken due to the early pit stop of the Stuck brothers. The track dried up and they wanted to set faster times as early as possible while the team of “Isert Motorsport” decided to call in their start driver Christopher Haase some time later.
When both teams changed their drivers after about two hours, the two X-Bows delivered a thrilling duel. 20 minutes before the race end, it seemed that the Stuck brothers would be able to win the battle. Due to the early first tyre change and the early refuelling during this stop, they had yet to come to the pits once again for a short “splash & dash” just before the race end and this was when they lost all their hopes for their first victory in the new car. “That was a fantastic start in the rain! I had a good start and quickly found my pace on the then drying track. With the slicks fitted to my car, I had a brilliant fight with our sister car”, said Ferdinand Stuck and his brother added: “When I got into the car, Ferdi told me that I could go full attack. This is exactly what I did, I caught up with the sister car after three laps but I didn’t find a possibility to overtake it right away. When I finally got passed, I had to come to the pits.”
