Moreno in Mercedes-GT at Nurburgring

The Brazilian Roberto Moreno, former stand-in for Christian Fittipaldi at Newman-Haas in CART will race this weekend on the Nurburgring in Germany for the 4th round of the FIA-GT-Series. He will start as one of the 6 drivers of the AMG-Mercedes-Benz-GT-team in the CLK-GTR, standing in for Alexander Wurz, who will be replacing Benetton-driver Gerhard Berger at the French Grand Prix this weekend in Magny Cours.

The AMG Team-cars are: Nr. 10 Alessandro Nannini (It) / Roberto Moreno (Bra) Nr. 11 Bernd Schneider (D) / Marcel Tiemann (D) Nr. 12 Klaus Ludwig (D) / Bernd Maylaender (D) They all run in the well-known silver outfit. 4 of these drivers where competing in the ITC-series last year.

The FIA-GT-serie is also coming to the USA, with races at Sebring on Oct 19th and at Laguna Seca on Oct 26th. These races will also include cars from the IMSA-series. The Hogan-team CART-driver Dario Franchitti is expected to join the team for these 2 events. Mercedes look for a good result at the Nurburgring, after 6 wins in a row in CART, but struggeling in Formula-1 with McLaren and having reliability problems with the CLK-GTR at the beginning of the GT-season. The car showed protential though with 2 poles and fastest laps, but had various problems especially with the gearbox. Despite that they didn't compete in LeMans and therefore had much time for modifications and testing. Bernd Schneider achieved a second place in Silverstone, but no other points-finishes for the 2 cars (the third has its premiere this weekend) yet.

For further information check out: http://www.mercedes-benz.de/e/sport/motorspo/spo16.htm

The race will be started at 12:00 CET and will be a 4 hour endurance race. All main competitors from the GT1 and GT2 categories at LeMans will be racing there as well, most notably GT1-LeMans-winners Gulf-McLaren-BMW with J.M. Gounon and P.H. Raphanel.

The race can be watched on DSF, who will broadcast live from the start and the finish at 16:00, and will show a report at 19:15 and 22:00, They are in german and on ASTRA. Also VOX will show a report at 16:00, also in german. Eurosport will also report from the event, though I don't know the exact time yet (checkout their teletext).

Greetings, Juergen (hoping for the weather to improve until sunday ...)

---------------------------------- Juergen Thomas Institut fuer Physik, Uni Mainz WA ETAP - NA 48 ----------------------------------