It’s another joint round between FIM e-Power and TTXGP, this time in Oschersleben in Germany. Race results have been posted

, but in this report I’ll focus on the Friday and Saturday results. On Saturday they held a “three lap sprint” race, which Matthias Himmelmann won. There was an over 20 second gap between him and team-mate Katja Poensgen, and the 2nd/3rd/4th/5th places all finished fairly close together indicating a fairly serious race going on between Muench and Zongshen.

A surprising thing I see in the results is Peter Linden racing with Zongshen. Usually he’s racing with his own bike, but Zongshen now has three bikes. At the prior race, Assen, Zongshen enlisted Wayne Tessels to ride the third bike. This time around it is Peter Linden riding it.

That’s Katja Poensgen in front, with Matthias Himmelmann in the rear and Thomas Schuricht in the middle (all Muench)

The three lap sprint was meant to let the riders showcase high speed riding, by not having to conserve battery power as they do for longer races.

1st place: Matthias Himmelman, no. 49 Muench Racing “I have to say I had a really great race with an exceptionally strong start, I was confident going into the race especially with such a great German crowd cheering on the team. They really help inspire us to do the best we can to put on a good show. The Sprint for me was a lot of fun because it allows everyone to to just race and not worry about battery management as they mst do for the longer race. I am happy so many of our sponsors where able to be here and share the experience. We have more than 100 guests celebrating in our teams hospitality unit and the atmosphere here at Oschersleben is great, we are really happy to have a first and second place today, but it will be even better when we have the whole podium tomorrow.”

2nd place: Katya Poensgen No. 65 Muench Racing “It was fantastic racing in the sprint, it is so raw, I could just open the throttle and go. It was short; I was not sweating but it was a lot of fun. I will do my best to go faster tomorrow for the big race. My bike has a different engine that Matthias’s bike as I am on the production racer and he has a development motor. We also run a different type of battery pack on this bike to the development bike as this is totally enclosed so safer, but it means you have to be more careful with over-heating. I am confident for tomorrow and looking forward to representing Muench once again.”
3rd place : Ho chi Fung; no.59 Zongshen “As a racer I don’t feel any different going into a sprint race or a longer distance one, I just want to go out there and win. The feeling is just the same. This race was great, I started from further back on the grid than I would have liked as we had some battery pack problems with the bike yesterday after the morning qualification where I was still learning the track. I only completed a few laps yesterday morning before we had some issues with the battery pack so I was forced to go slower than I had wanted to. We spent a lot of yesterday afternoon working hard on the pack, and missed the second qualifying session. Over night we have charged and discharged the new configuration; my team have worked really hard to give me the best possible bike for the race and everything seems to be holding ok. I am really optimistic about electric racing; I have only been eracing for a few years but have along history with my first love Petrol bikes, but my team is amazing and the pace at which the technology is developing I am confident it will not take them too long before they will be build me a bike that will go even faster the traditional petrol fuelled bikes.”

“.. I expected this new bike with a more powerful motor and better batteries to be faster; I had really high expectations and was really disappointed in Assen with all the problems we had been having but this was due to the lack of time to properly prepare and test the bike away from racing. The team are still getting to know this new bike but learning very fast. This morning I had a bit of traffic in front of me including my team mate Tang Yu; it actually took me over half a lap to get ahead of him as he was racing well. I got really close to Thomas in the second lap coming out of the chicane, but his bike is very powerful on the straights, I thought I would wait until the last corner to try again, and it worked for me. I got closer and closer and finally took over him on the right side on the last corner… I actually was disappointed though as I wanted to come second today, we felt we had the bike and racer to do this but with the traffic early on it was impossible to catch them all in just three laps., I need a little more time. We look forward to tomorrows race.”
4th place: Thomas Schricht, no. 6 Muench racing “I am not sure exactly what happened because I have not had the time yet to examine the date from the bikes but I was so happy in the first lap, the bike was doing much better than yesterday and I had a great feeling about the race. I was actually trying to push the bike further and try to catch Katya but I made a small mistake in the chicane in lap twp and noticed that Ho Chi had come up really close. I then focused on making up the ground and in the last lap in the last corner, just when I need to keep maximum power, Ho Chi sailed passed me and my bike just didn’t give me the power I needed as it should have done. Overall I had a great race, it was a lot of fun racing in a sprint, we have obviously meet with Zongshen on the track a number of times and they are always great to race against.”

RACE ONE

pos	no.	rider	team (bike)	time	gap	best (lap)
1	49	Himmelman	Muench (Muench TTE)	5:02.397		1:38.481 (2)
2	65	Poensgen	Muench (Muench TTE)	5:26.100	23.703	1:46.683 (3)
3	59	Fung	Zongshen (Zongshen)	5:30.231	27.703	1:46.588 (3)
4	6	Schricht	Muench (Muench TTE)	5:31.727	29.330	1:47.858 (2)
5	25	Yu	Zongshen (Zongshen)	5:37.289	34.892	1.48.881 (2)
6	36	Amendt	Epo (Epobike)	5:45.968	43.571	1.53.142 (2)
7	72	Reichmann	Reichmann Racing (mavizen TTX02)	5:47.529	45.132	1:52.167 (3)
8	64	Linden	Zongshen (Zongshen)	5:48.422	46.045	1:52.385 (3)
9	91	Bergau	Bergau Racing (mavizen TTX02)	5:51.170	48.773	1:53.782 (3)
Fastest lap
	49	Himmelman	Muench			138.481 (2)

Harold Gasse did not qualify to take place in today’s race.

http://www.egrandprix.com/news.php?id=305

http://www.egrandprix.com/news.php?id=303 (for Friday)

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.