Nürburgring Endurance Championship

Volk, Fischer earn first top-five of season

by Fischer Motorsport PR

May 2, 2021 11:24 PM CET 652 Views

The No. 84 BMW team confirms its strong performance from last weekend's Nürburgring 24 Hours by taking P5 in Sunday's iRacing NEC Round 2! Florian Volk and Benjamin Fischer put together a clean race and with perfect strategy came all the way from P19 on the grid to claim the top-five. The No. 85 BMW team failed to finish the race after Y. Hignet crashed early in the race.

The Nürburgring showed off its beautiful side for the second round of the iRacing Nürburgring Endurance Championship (NEC) 2021, on a nice spring day with temperatures of up to 26°C and changing skies.

In qualifying it was Y. Hignet leading the charge for Fischer Motorsport, setting a fastest lap of 7:53.100 in the No. 85 BMW – good enough for P11 on the starting grid. Florian Volk, who made his debut as a starting driver in his young NEC career, qualified 19th with a lap of 7:54.739 in an extraordinarily competitive starter field.

The start did go smoothly for both teams and Hignet and Volk were both able to maintain their positions, after there was no crash in turn one – something rather unusual in the series.

Volk quickly proved that he had tremendous pace and picked up a few positions soon, to move into P14 by the third lap.

On the same lap, the race turned into disaster for the No. 85 BMW team and Y. Hignet. The Frenchman made a driver error in the little carousel of the track section “Schwalbenschwanz”, when he got onto the inner curb leading to a spin and crash into the guard rail.

While Hignet was able to slowly get the car back to the pits for repairs, the incident threw the team back by about half a lap and to P27, all but ending hopes for a respectable finish.

Lap 3: Yannick Hignet crashes into the barriers at Schwalbenschwanz, foreshadowing an early DNF for the No. 85 BMW team in NEC Round 2

In lap ten, Hignet once again lost control over his car on the exit of Hatzenbach, leading to more severe damage and forcing the team to retire for good.

“Tough day, really tough day. No doubt about it.”, Pascal Theis said.

“We thought we were well prepared after last weekend. But really, nothing came together for us today.”, Theis added, who suffered two DNF and a bittersweet eighth place with crash at the Nürburgring in the last three weeks.

Florian Volk in the No. 84 BMW meanwhile showed a tremendous performance and set the team’s fastest lap time on lap four. In lap five the Grebenhain, Germany native moved up into P12, against big-name competition like H2 Performance.

On lap seven the first pit stop of the day was coming up and the team decided to sit tight and leave Volk in the car, going for a strategy to complete the race with two double stints for each driver.

“For us, the big question was, if we can do it with two stints each, or if we needed one more stop on top. It was really close. The tires were okay, but constantly had to keep an eye on the fuel.”, team manager Benjamin Fischer said.

For Volk, the mission was simple: Go flat out. And so the 26-year-old kept pushing and set off fireworks with a fantastic drive in his second stint, all the way up to P5.

“The car was simply fantastic today. I had such a good run and everything felt perfect. The tires were worn out a bit towards the end, especially in the right handers. But that’s part of it. I’m really happy with my performance today.”, said Volk.

At the end of lap 14, the Hessian handed over the car to team-mate Fischer. The Leipzig, Germany who is regarded as one of the fuel milage and tire saving experts on the team, focused on saving enough fuel for one extra lap per stint, in an attempt of the team to finish out the race on back-to-back eight-lap stints.

The 37-year-old was able to maintain position, but had to survive a big scare on lap 24 when narrowly avoiding a three-car crash at Kallenhardt. Also in the time afterwards, Fischer barely found time to catch his breath, as he found himself under immense pressure from behind by the No. 69 BMW of Bahia-Santos in the battle for fifth position.

Fischer kept a cool head, even though the opponent often times closed the gap to within half a car length. On lap 27 Thomas Scholl made a driver error at the small jump of Pflanzgarten, leading to a horrific accident for him.

For Fischer, this meant he is full focus was now to bring the car home. Thanks to the race distance working out to be exactly thirty laps, the team did not need an extra stop for fuel and thus the No. 84 BMW eventually crossed the finish line in fifth position.

“I think that was pretty much the best we could do today. Maybe fourth place would have been possible; I saved a little bit too much fuel for a while there.”, Fischer said.

“But on the side, we’ve seen again today, that teams make mistakes and retire when they always push 100%. I’m extremely happy that we brought home a clean race.”

“A huge compliment to Florian. It’s unreal what he did today, absolutely spectacular. I believe that dude woke up angry today or something. We’ll have to ask him what was going on with him (laughing). He did such a fantastic job and really got us to the front.”

The fifth-place finish marks the first GT3 class top-five finish in the NEC for Fischer Motorsport, since September 15th, 2018 when the team won NEC Round 7 of the 2018 season in an Audi R8 LMS.

The NEC now takes a well-deserved four-week break before returning to action on May 30th for championship round 3.

Official Race Results - 2021 iRacing NEC Round 2