Volker Strycek is making History

The VLN stands for diversity. This is amongst others underlined by the number of class winners in this season. In the nine races of the year 2018 at the legendary Nordschleife, there had been 251 different class winners. An amazing figure. With Stephan Köhler and Christian Kohlhaas, there was, however, one team that never let another crew go first. With the Ferrari 458 of racing one, they were unbeatable in class SP8. In the overall classification, the driver duo had never finished worse than 27th position but they also never made it into the top ten. They were very close to that at the 58th ADAC Reinoldus-Langstreckenrennen where they finished eleventh. Due to this series of victories, they finally finished third in the final VLN championship classification. Less pleased was definitely Audi as, for the first time after seven years, this manufacturer could not take the overall championship title.

And of course, there were a number of big and smaller jubilees to celebrate again at VLN9. Volker Strycek was making history at the 43rd DMV Münsterlandpokal. The long-time Opel Sports Director scored a victory in class SP3T together with his children Lena and Robin – and this was his 100thclass win in the VLN statistics which have been maintained since 1990. Strycek is the only second driver who achieved this figure of wins. The most successful VLN driver is still Ralf Schall with 102 class victories. For Strycek’s daughter Lena, it was already her tenth class win in the Opel Astra J OPC Cup. The same number of successful results in this biggest grassroots series of the world has been scored by Martin Kroll. The Swiss won class SP6 with a BMW M3 GTR.

On top of gaining the Championship, the current VLN Champion Philipp Leisen, driving for the Pixum Team Adrenalin Motorsport, took his 25thclass win at the season finale in the highly contested class of production cars up to 2,500cc capacity.