The third round of the season in the TMG GT86 Cup at the Nürburgring provided an extremely eventful and exciting race. After four hours racing, Manuel Amweg and Frédéric Yerly of Toyota Swiss Racing Team secured their first win of the season, just slightly ahead of the team of Leutheuser Racing&Events and the drivers ”Jan Sluis“ und Dirk Leßmeister. Into third position finished Jacques Derenne and “Brody“ of the Belgian team Pit Lane – AMC Sankt Vith. As the current championship leader Milltek Racing this time finished only in fifth place, the battle for the lead in the overall classification of the single-brand cup of TOYOTA Motorsport GmbH is getting closer and closer. So the next round which will take place on 8th July promises to provide a lot of excitement again.
With the triple of achieving pole position, fastest race lap and race victory, the Toyota Swiss Racing Team did not only gain the maximum score of 22 points but also closed in on the championship leaders of Milltek-Racing and underlined its target to defend their last year’s win in the Cup. “We advanced our first pit stop by one lap to get out of the traffic. So we had a free track for a long time and were able to set fast lap times and thus to extend our gap to our rivals”, said Manuel Amweg regarding the strategy of the Swiss team which turned out to be very successful. “I was then even able to reduce the speed a little in the last race lap and control the race until the finish”, reported Amweg.
This was however also possible as their opponents of Leutheuser Racing&Events, who had meanwhile closed the gap to the Swiss team up to only four seconds, had a slight collision with another car three laps before the finish and suffered a tyre damage on the front left side. “Jan Sluis” and Dirk Leßmeister nevertheless fulfilled the target set by their team principal Christian Leutheuser before the race (”We want to finish better than third place, and thus score our best result in the 2017 season to date”). So Leutheuser was not frustrated about the missed victory and was happy about a “really good result”.
Milltek Racing this time was not lucky at all. “I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time”, was the comment of Lucian Gavris regarding their incident in the very first race hour. “There was an accident ahead of me and all of a sudden a car was standing right in front of me on the track. I had to go over the green to avoid another collision and crashed into the barriers with the right side of our car. The axle was bent and we lost about 15 minutes due to the repair. Afterwards, we had to try to limit the damage and to focus on at least gaining still some points. And we finally succeeded in doing so by finishing fifth. That was the maximum we could achieve today.”
