ADAC GT Masters Red Bull Ring Strong uptrend of the McLaren

At the last weekend the ADAC GT Masters took place at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria. Of course the McLaren MP4-12C of the MRS team was in on it. Local hero Philipp Eng shared the work on the steering wheel again with Christian Ott. Already on Friday at the free practice the MRS team revealed, that it has to be faced with the British sports car. Philipp Eng reached the first place in the result list and could effort an advance of 4/10 seconds, while the other competitors behind acted in hundredth. This strong performance of the team from Lonsee could be taken into the qualifying. Indeed Christian Ott could not turn the strong performance of the McLaren over in a perfect lap, however Philipp Eng succeeded again the top time with an advance of 2/10 seconds on the competitors and therefore he established a new lap record for a GT3 car in the ADAC GT Masters with a average speed of 171,9 km/h. At the same time this result meant the first pole position for a McLaren in the ADAC GT Masters. "I posted one really good lap to get myself up to third then we made some small changes to the car. That made it even better, and I had an excellent lap. Normally, you make one or two tiny mistakes on a lap, but this one was just perfect. Getting pole position is a great achievement for the whole team after we had such a difficult start to the season.", said a happy Philipp Eng after the qualifying. But the races went rather unhappy. Christian Ott, who was the starting driver at the race on Saturday for the first half of the race, was involved in a starting collision and a few laps later he spun. This spinout ended with a heavy impact into the circuit barrier, where the MRS McLaren was damaged hardly. Therefore there was a night shift on the program, the MRS mechanics worked very hard to rebuild the car for Sunday. On Sunday the start happened from the pole position. While Philipp Eng adhered exactly to the orders of the race control to accomplish a correct start, a lot of participants tried to leverage this. Thus, the McLaren came in difficulties just at turn one and had to be relegated of a Corvette on the second position. Indeed the misbehavior was punished by some drive through penalties, but this did not help Philipp anymore. Already shortly after he was attacked by Martin Ragginger, who started a little bit imprudent overtaking and thereby he hit the McLaren of Philipp Eng. After the spinout Eng could start a catch-up race and improved himself of ten positions, but then he had to abandon the McLaren because of a suspension damage, which resulted from the collision with Ragginger. In spite of the predominance concerning the speed, the MRS team could not show an appropriate race result at this weekend, but could impressively demonstrate that the hard work of the last months paid off. The MRS McLaren was indisputably the fastest car over the whole weekend, with a little race luck it is only a question of time, when it will come to the required race result. Karsten Molitor: „We are very happy that finally we could show the potential of the McLaren. The pole position and the fact that we had the fastest car over the whole weekend, make us optimistic for the future. At this opportunity I want to thank our team and McLaren GT, who worked so hard the last months. Of course you need a little bit of race luck for such a highly competitive race series as the ADAC GT Masters. But we did not have it. Besides a few participants drive with very little care what cost us at least one race at this weekend. Maybe the ladies and gentlemen think about that it could be their own end in a race.“ This weekend the MRS team will have their next race weekend. The tenth and eleventh run of the Porsche Carrera Cup will take place at the GP track of the Nürburgring, on the same platform as the DTM. Your MRS Team