Suzuki Castrol win Oschersleben 24 Hour

The World Endurance Championship will be decided at the final round of the year, the Bol dOr 24 Hour. © FGSport. Series leaders Suzuki Castrol have won the Oschersleben 24 Hour round of the World Endurance Championship - their fourth race win out of six races this season - while second place has gone to Yamaha Austria and third to Yamaha Phase One.

In order to stay in contention for the championship title, Yamaha Austria were forced to put the pressure on Suzuki Castrol from the very start. In qualifying they had been their closest to the Suzuki all year, and in the opening laps of the race these two bikes immediately pulled out a clear advantage over the rest of the field.

Yamaha Austrias hopes were dashed at the first pit stop when they lost 50 seconds replacing a broken mudguard fixing, and again an hour later when they had to replace a loose twist grip and a faulty fuel pump. This gave Suzuki Castrol an advantage which they held and in fact increased over the rest of the race.

In the final hours of the race Suzuki Castrol had two problems; a broken chain and a leaking fuel tank. The chain broke on the final corner allowing the bike to coast into the pits and the tank leak was spotted during the team's final stop; neither cost the team a significant amount of time.

Behind the leaders Yamaha Phase One and Kawasaki Bolliger were locked in an 18 hour long fight for third place which was only resolved when light rain fell in the morning and Phase One's Christer Miniin was able to pull away from the Kawasaki in the slippery conditions.

Acropolis Zone Rouge rode to their best result of the year with fifth place, with Kawasaki Diablo in sixth and local heroes RMT21 Honda in seventh place. Suzuki Fagersjo-el.se had looked set for a top five result, but a series of setbacks knocked them into eighth place, ahead of Suzuki SRU Sangerhausen and Suzuki Austria Team 76.

Yamaha Austria's second place means that the World Endurance Championship will be decided at the final round of the year, the Bol d'Or 24 Hour race on September the 16th and 17th.

Vincent Philippe, Suzuki Castrol, first place: "It's a very hard race for everybody. We had some problems at the end and I was thinking to myself 'maybe Oschersleben doesn't want a Suzuki victory'. But to win here is very nice and now we must focus on the Bol d'Or because the championship is not in our pocket yet."

Sebastien Scarnato, Yamaha Austria, second place: "We are very happy with this race, because it is the first time we are so close to Suzuki Castrol on the track. This is a big satisfaction for the team. For sure we finished second, but not the same second place that we have done at other races. We've shown that we can go fast; the team, the bike and the tyres all worked very well."

Christer Miniin, Yamaha Phase One Endurance, third place: "This race has been a really tough one right from the beginning. We were second, then third, then fourth, then we had a long fight with Bolliger... We all did what we could and the result is fantastic. The team has got better and stronger over the season."
(FGSport)

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