LACKO LIVENS CZECH CROWD WITH HOME WIN
On his second Goodyear FIA European Truck Racing Championship race of 2023, Adam Lacko converted his reverse grid pole to a spectacular win in front of home crowds.
Steffi Halm kept the pressure up on the home favourite, placing her IVECO truck perfectly to optimise any mistakes made by the returning veteran. But Lacko was a cool customer, keeping the race under his control even after an abandoned start.
The start incident came from the middle of the field, as the grid set off. It seemed to be a regulatory start until André Kursim made an opportunistic move trying to get between Mark Taylor and Steffen Faas, who had started on the row in front of Kursim. Not being able to make it work three wide, Kursim caught the rear of Faas, pushing the German into Taylor’s truck beside him. Taylor lost control of the #81, spinning to face the racing traffic and hitting the wall of the pit lane.
Both Kursim and Faas are under investigation at the time of publishing, with race stewards looking to be giving Kursim a penalty that will be applied in Race 3 for the incident.
This brought out the red flag and a 20-minute delay to the race start, but Taylor – after a quick visit to the medical centre – was cleared OK and fit to race. It will be a #onetruckfamily effort to get Taylor back on the grid ahead of tomorrow’s racing, but certainly everyone will pool in to help the Taylors Trucksport Racing Team.
On the second restart, Halm appeared to get a poor start, dropping to midway down the order before the first corner. An incident between father and son Lukas and Jochen Hahn that saw the #2 truck spun around and both off in the gravel, helped Halm regain the places she lost, and she was back to second by Turn 3.
Lacko was under investigation for a suspected breach of the start procedure regulation. The Czech racer appeared to slow down, forcing Halm to do the same to stay in second place, and then picked up speed again at the start to blast into the lead.
The starts of Lacko, Jochen Hahn and Lukas Hahn were all investigated by the stewards and deemed to require no further action.
Jamie Anderson had a fairly quiet race to third, always sticking with the leading duo to also try and optimise on any mistakes. The podium finishers were separated by under a second at the chequered flag, showing how any of the three of them could have taken the win right up to the last corner.
Starting from reverse grid eighth, Norbert Kiss led his fellow championship rivals through the field to take fourth. With Jochen Hahn at the back of the grid after his first lap contact, Kiss just had to focus on keeping Antonio Albacete behind to extend his championship lead. Albacete kept the Hungarian looking in his rear-view mirrors throughout the race, never letting him get too far ahead and only missing out on forth by two tenths of a second.
José Edurardo Rodrigues took another Promoter’s Cup victory, sixth overall, ahead of Sascha Lenz and Jochen Hahn who completed the points-finishing positions.
After receiving a drive-through penalty for over speeding at the start, Steffen Faas recovered well to finish ninth overall, second in Promoter’s Cup, to not lose too many points to Rodrigues in the Chrome-class championship standings. Lukas Hahn was tenth, completing the Promoter’s Cup podium.
John Newell and Clemens Hecker were the only other two finishers of race two as Luis Recuenco retired on the penultimate lap and Taylor was unable to restart after his crash.
Kursim was disqualified from the race after three separate incidents of over speeding were clocked on three different laps. The German had already had to start from the pits due to repairs to his truck needed after the Taylor incident, so it is possible that there was some GPS damage on the #11 Don’t Touch Racing machine that caused the inaccuracies in Kursim’s speeds.
A full day of truck action is coming at you tomorrow, with Qualifying 2 kicking off proceedings at 10:00. Rain is due to fall over the Autodrom Most all day tomorrow, so it is certain to be a very different day of racing to today.
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