It was a surprise for me to be there, as I was to late to subscribe with my own team, but a few days before the race Fola called me and asked if I'd wanna be his third driver in his team SG Stern. I happily accepted of course.
It turned out to be one of my best surprise's ever in slotracing. I've never seen such a superb event. The technical level was unbelievable high, competition was awesome, and the friendship between all the racers gave me the best feeling I've had in a long time in slotracing.
Coming to a race with only my controller was a welcome fact for me
Practise with Fola's concours winning car went surprisingly well, and at the end of practise we reached the 7,4 sec barier
The teams of Ralph Seif, Martin Bartelmes, Peter Oberbillig and Bad Boys were doing 7,2 sec, and after those teams we were about 6-8th fastest of the field.
The qualification lane was randomly picked just before qualifying, so nobody could do extra practise. For us the chosen lane 7 was a bit unlucky, since we didn't practise a lot on lane 7. I did my best in the three laps I had and qualified an unlucky 27th.
Our race was pretty good, although we still don't really know why the car was getting slower towards the end. When all was over we were still a reasonable 20th.
Watching the finals was one of the most thrilling races ever. Keeping in mind ACR's performance in practise, I kept my eyes on them while they went through the slower lanes first, where Caroline and Ralf Seif did a great job. But when they came to lane 1,2 and 3, it was Alex's turn. He put in some blistering times and soon pulled away to a certain win. But the real excitement was the last stint.
Before each last stint of a group, there was a technical controle, which revealed that the BadBoys were criticly low. This had to be fixed in ten laps. This meant that Christoph Kremer had no time to true down the new tires he wanted to put on the car. So after the tyre change Michael Niemass had to race on wheels of 27,5 in diameter, where normally everyone raced on 26.0. Of course the entire car was extremely high on clearance now.
Back on the track in fifth position, Michael did such a stint on the relatively slow lane 5, on undriveable tires, that I can only put this emoticon here
Soon he was back in fourth, then to third, chasing down number two, Kevin Krollman on which he had one lap less. Pushing like hell Micheal got within two meter of Kevin on the quicker lane 1, and then ran out of time.
With Andreas Laufenberg's Kraner Racing having reached 747 laps in the previous heat, meant the BadBoys finished fourth, a truly unbelievable result.
Right after the race there was such a nice surprise by Kurt Petri. On a huge screen on the walls there was a 4 minute videoclip of this weekends race, with high and low points of the teams, leaded by the "we are the champions' song. Truly fantastic!
Right from Thusrday morning when I arrived till Saturday evening, every detail was covered by Kurt Petri and his crew. The local TV station and two newspapers where there to report the race, and having a real grandstand for visiting non-slotracers, were on average 50-70 people were watcing the races, was also so nice!
This organisation was something I've never seen before, making it an honour for me to having been at the DPM 2008. For this I want to thank Kurt and all the people present.
