Montaplast by Land-Motorsport #28 grabbed the victory at the 49. Barbarossapreis at Nürburgring, or just in short, VLN8.
The Audi team with Dries Vanthoor and Markus Winkelhock behind the wheel of an Audi R8 LMS led the race almost from start to finish. Wochenspiegel Team Monschau Ferrari 488 GT3 #22 started the race from Pole Position, but they lost the lead right after the Mercedes Arena on Lap 1.
Black Falcon #7 in their Mercedes-AMG GT3 was the team pushing #28 the hardest and finished second ahead of #22.
Manthey Racing #911 was battling right in front of the field for the first hour of the race, but Matteo Cairoli got caught out by a rain shower only few corners into his first stint in the car, after Kevin Estre had shadowed first position for the first hour of the race. A slightly greasy track and an overtaking manoeuvre against the slower #549 BMW 318is which didn’t get finished, resulted in the #911 spinning around, and in fact got the #549 all the way up the front of the Porsche and riding on the wind shield. Fortunately Cairoli could climb out of the car, but there was so much damage to the car that he couldn’t continue.
Photo: Jan Brucke/VLN
The race had started on a dry track, but was changing to partly wet one hour into the race. Only during the final hour of the race, there was dry asphalt all the way around the lap, and by then most of the positions had been locked in – at least in the SP9 category where the fastest GT3 cars compete.
The best BMW was Walkenhorst Motorsport #100 which finished fourth, but with more than four minutes after the winning Audi.
Phoenix Audi #15 finish P5 after a wrong tire choice in the middle of the race, when they went on full wets, with an over partly wet track. Until that point they had been fighting for the lead.
A total of 164 cars had taken the start, but only 10 cars in the SP9 category and none GT3-alike cars in SPX, which was the smallest field of the year with the fastest cars. Several of the teams are slowly starting to close down for the winter, so it will be interesting to see how many will be at the season finale. 33 cars retired from this race, and some of them with quite heavy damage.
The final of this years VLN Championship will be held on 21 October, where VLN9 will be run over 4 hours.
