GT Sprint: Mission accomplished! MTM Team and Thomas Schöffler win the title for Audi

MTM Press Release

Vallelunga: 8th and last race of the GT Sprint Series 2013

“It was no walk in the park but a championship is not decided in a single race.” Roland Mayer, Managing Director of MTM GmbH, is satisfied with the way the season has gone, although the team was unfortunately unable to clinch a happy conclusion before the gates of the Eternal City. “We had two pit stops because of flat tyres and had to look on our competitors fighting for the top”, was how press officer Karla Kanz explained the unaccustomed sight of the black and red mtm Audi R8 LMS at the back of the field. And yet the first qualifying round had looked like presaging an exciting contest with the Ukraine team’s Ferrari 458s. Thomas Schöffler qualified for the third place on the starting grid but had to settle for a lower ranking in the race. But his joy at the first title in his still young career predominates: “the performance curve has become ever steeper, we raised our game from one race to the next, were never defenceless against the Ferraris’ numerical superiority and often enough won or at at least scored regularly and that is also why we deserved to win the title.”

Schöffler, who once again shared his cockpit with the Swede Johan Kristoffersson, notched up a total of 226 points, second-placed Glauco Solieri in his Porsche 911, managed a tally of 198, just two more than the Ukrainian Andrii Kruglyk in a Ferrari 458. The MTM Audi R8 LMS and Thomas Schöffler clearly dominated this year’s series. Since this championship started in 2010, there has only ever been one previous occasion when the Audi R8 drew attention to itself: last year in Pergusa the Italian team Merendino/Di Benedetto took 6th place.

The period after a race is the prelude to the next. But whether MTM confronts the pack again next year is as yet undecided. We do however have this utterance by boss Roland Mayer to go by: “there is no better advertising than racing successes over miles, metres and seconds.”

Photo credit: MTM