Boss GP delivered great racing in the Netherlands

Boss GP delivered an action-packed weekend, when they visited the Dutch track, Assen.

The race series is a mix of different single-seaters, that have become too old to compete in their original championships.

This weekend it was part of Gamma Racing Day, which was a great mix of single-seaters, motorcycle and Superkart racing, plus there was some show with Mika Häkkinen and Dani Pedrosa in a Mercedes C63 and Honda MotoGP bike respectively.

The top of the charts in Boss GP are the cars in the Open category. Here we, among others, find a Jaguar R5 and a Toro Rosso STR1, that are old Formula 1 cars.

The Jaguar is piloted by the Dutchman Klaas Zwart, who amongst other things, are the man behind the car brand Ascari as well as Circuito Ascari in Spain. He is also the father of Pauline Zwart, who has previously raced in ETCC furthermore, he is father-in-law to Tom Coronell, who races WTCC.

The Toro Rosso is driven by the Austrian Ingo Gerstl, who has raced many different single-seater series. He also tested in Formula 1 in 1996 for Forti.

The other category competing is the Formula category. He we see GP2 cars, World Series by Renault, AutoGP, World Series by Nissan and Formula 3000 cars.

The weekend started Saturday morning with free practice. Gerstl quickly showed great pace and made it clear that everybody else had to speed up a lot if they wanted to catch him this weekend. Zwart was 2nd while Gary Hauser from the Formula category finished with an impressive 3rd fastest time.

The qualifying was held in the middle of the afternoon. Once again Gerstl proved that he was the fastest guy, followed by Zwart and Hauser. Midway through the session we saw a red flag, after Henk de Boer and Christian Eicke collided and both cars had to be recovered from the gravel. Unfortunately it was the end for de Boer, while Eicke would be able to be back to the track on Sunday.

Race 1 was held in beautiful early evening sun, where 20 growling cars speared into turn 1. Opposite to many races series today, these cars don’t have any noise limits, so it was was a wonderful mix of V8, V10 and V12 engines.

The Toro Rosso driver Gerstl took the start while Zwart in the Jaguar managed to overtake him on the second lap. Unfortunately,  Salvatore de Plano and Christof von Grünigen had to retire from the race, which meant a safety car period to recover the cars.

When the green flag was given, Gerstl was fast out of the blocks and overtook Zwart into turn 1 and lead all the was to the chequered flag. Frits van Eerd finished in a comfortable 3rd with his Minardi PS04B Formula 1 racer.

In the Formula category we saw a superb drive by Gary Hauser in his GP2 car beating Christopher Brenier, Luis Michael Dorrbecker and Mahaveer Raghunathan who had a great fight for the last 2 podium positions, and finished as mentioned.

Sunday afternoon we saw the cars ready to race again, even with a few more cars added on compared to race 1. Unfortunately Eerd’s Minardi didn’t make the start for this race.

Once again it was a great fight between Gerstl and Zwart – until the very final lap of the race, where Zwart had a collision with Karl-Heinz Becker in a World Series by Nissan racer, when the latter was lapped. Therefore we saw Peter Milavec in a Panoz Champ car racer on a impressive 2nd position in the Open category, while Hans Laub in a Forti FG03 F1 car took the last place on the podium.

In the Formula class we saw Gary Hauser clear everything ahead of Christopher Brenier in his Superleague Formula racer and Luis Michael Dorrbecker in a Lola B05/52 AutoGP car.

The results from the weekend meant that Ingo Gerstl has opened up a gap in the Open Championship with an almost 50 points lead to Peter Milavec while Klaas Zwart fell back to 3rd position.

In the Formula Championship we have Christopher Brenier leading comfortable ahead of Philippe Haezebrouck and Gary Hauser.

The next round of Boss GP will be held on September 9th-11th in Brno, before the season finale on October 7th-9th at Imola.