PK Carsport Appeal
And Other Oschersleben Dramas

PK Carsport has appealed the team’s exclusion from the FIA GT event at Oschersleben last weekend. The #4 Corvette C5.R took an emphatic win in the event, but was then excluded owing to an oversize fuel system.

“The team denies that the tank is too big but will give no further reaction because the case is in the hands of their defenders (lawyers).”

The fuel system has apparently been unchanged throughout the time the car has been run by the Belgian team.

Under the current rules, with two pit stops required, the fuel system is less of a factor in the way the races unfold, although one driver is permitted to complete as long a stint as he wishes (within reason - as long as the other completes at least 35 minutes behind the wheel, and two stops with driver changes are made).

The German round was a frustrating affair in several ways. Michael Cotton has expressed his views on the current format of the FIA GT events – while at least a couple of drivers were angered by the aggressive tactics that were used on track.

Both the #5 Corvette and #1 Maserati used the hard Michelins for qualifying, which was a factor in both stopping after the warm up lap – to change tyres and drivers (and to get a pit stop out of the way).

Jean-Denis Deletraz worked his way up to eighth, ahead of the #1 Maserati – but effectively a lap down at this stage. A charging Stefan Mucke then “struck me in the right rear, breaking the suspension.”

That also initiated a pit stop for the #7 Lamborghini, with a puncture.

Deletraz then claims that Mucke “broke in an identical way the suspension of Maserati No. 2, then touched, in straight line, Maserati No.12... Incredible and unacceptable... without a penalty.”

Christian Montanari clears that one up, stating that it was Christophe Bouchut who hit the #2 Maserati, while Miguel Ramos was at the wheel. “Everything was running fine, until my team-mate Ramos was hit from behind by an opponent’s car,” says Montanari. It was indeed Bouchut at the wheel at the time.

Meanwhile, the #7 Lamborghini was excluded from the results, the team explaining that ‘the Stewards found a difference between the gearwheels used and the exact specification of gearwheels on the homologation paper. …. the gearwheels themselves had different specifications to those specified on the sheet’.

“We have only used this kind of gearwheel in the last three years,” says Hans Reiter “but made a mistake when typing them on the homologation sheet. This has been obligatory since the beginning of the year. The mistake is definitely that of Reiter Engineering, so we had to apologise to Team ALL-INKL.COM and the drivers Christophe Bouchut and Stefan Muecke.”