TCR World and life

34 ENDURANCE The Castrol Honda team won the TCR class in the ADAC 24 Hours at the Nürburgring for the second year running. The winning Civic was driven by Tiago Monteiro, Dominik Fugel, Markus Oestreich and Esteban Guerrieri (above and right). The Honda quickly moved up into the lead and was trailed by the two Hyundai Motorsport cars, an i30 N TCR for Luca Engstler, Manuel Lauck, Antti Buri and Harald Proczyk, and a Veloster N for Lauck, Moritz Oestreich, Peter Terting and Marc Basseng. The i30 dropped out of contention seven hours into the race, losing several laps when it was given a mechanical black flag for exceeding noise limits, while the Veloster too lost ground due to some minor technical issues and dropped one lap behind the leading Honda. As the rain intensified, the competition was red-flagged at 22:30, and wasn’t restarted until 08:00 on Sunday. From then on, the Honda was again chased by the Veloster. Terting and Oestreich put the Veloster back on the same lap as the leaders, and began to eat into the advantage, bringing it down to under four minutes as the conditions improved. The Hyundai (bottom right) still couldn’t catch the Honda, which would win the race with by just one lap.