Following the climactic event of this year’s FIA European Truck Racing Championship, the Truck Grand Prix on the Nürburgring, the long-awaited holiday break is now upon us. In earlier years, till 2004 that is, the circus headed directly from the Eifel to Finland. And even if that journey was time-consuming, most of the participants actually found racing up north very relaxing after their wrestles on the Ring. In the six years till the 2010 season there was a good six-week gap. That year the race at Smolenskring was added to the calendar, scheduled two weeks after the TGP.
The expedition to Russia through Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia was somewhat of an adventure for everyone, with high levels of stress all round, not to mention the enormous amounts of time and money involved. Many teams had no chance at all to drop in at their workshops.
This year there’s no race in Russia, so the truck racers are using the time following the TGP to revive and refresh.
The grand show that the 170,000 spectators at the Ring so enjoyed was anything but fun and games for those responsible for making it the biggest European festival for trucking fans that it has come to be. But all the hard work and stress paid off handsomely — at the end the fans had absolutely no cause for complaint, certainly not about the marquee event on the Müllenbachschleife.
