RC-Lemans Series Rd4 – Report
The AMC Hildesheim track near Hanover in the Northern part of Germany played host to round 4 of this year’s RC-Lemans Series last weekend. The weather was good all weekend except from a quite heavy rain shower on Saturday evening. The fast LMP1 class saw local hero and point standings leader Timo Schad leading the way in the qualifiers where he made a clean sweep to take the pole position for the triple A-mains from Tobias Weist on the 2 spot. Joachim Behnken, Reinder Wilms and Josip Bogdanovic followed behind while the swift Altmann duo of Kai and Tim were absent at round 4.
In the opening A-main Timo and Tobias instantly opened up a gap on the field with Tobias eventually taking the lead after a nice pass coming out of Timo’s slipstream. The latter however took back the lead a couple of laps later and he also was able to open a small gap to bring home the win while Tobias had his problems to get through lapped drivers. A2 was pretty much a blueprint of A1, however this time it was Tobias who brought home the win while Timo had a bit of bad luck. In 3rd Reinder was on his own pace as he was in A1. The third and final A-main would bring the decision and Tobias was willing to bring home the overall victory, however he once missed the fast corner at the end of the main straight and scored a DNF which allowed Timo to shift into cruise mode to bring home the win in A3 and with it the overall victory. Behind him, Reinder came in 2nd from Joachim in 3rd. With the win at round 4 Timo already scored three wins this season and he can already seal the bag at the forthcoming round 5 held at the AMCA Apeldoorn club in The Netherlands. Behind Timo it was Tobias with the runner-up spot from Reinder in 3rd.
In the LMP2 Stock class local heroes Kai Asmer and Rainer Schad lead the way in the opening two qualifiers with the two sharing a TQ each. Thomas Stenger, in only his second RC-Lemans race ever, however would score the overall TQ some 66 thousands of a second from Rainer and Kai. Joachim Behnken and Michael Holla completed the top 5.
In the opening A-main Rainer unfortunately scored a DNF which allowed Thomas to take the win from tone to tone with a lap margin from Kai and Michael. In A2 Thomas set the sails to take the overall win early, however he was hotly contested by Rainer who was able to pass Thomas in the early stages of the leg. From there he never looked back and he took the win with a 3-seconds margin on Thomas while Kai came in 3rd. At the start of the deciding A3 Thomas had quite a mishap and he had to recover from being dead last. Up front Rainer and Michael were in a close battle with Thomas being able to recover to 2nd about half-way into the race. Thomas was hot on the heels of Rainer who made an unfortunate error some 10 meters before the finish line, allowing Thomas to take the win in A3 and with it the overall from Rainer in 2nd and Kai in 3rd. Special mention goes to young Florian Kölsch who scored a nice 6th place finish, coming from 8th on the grid, awarding him as best junior of the race.
Source: RC-Lemans [rc-lemans.de]
