Osborne Motorsports team driver Stu Jones has been in touch to give a travel update as the lads get ready to depart for their journey to the Nürburgring for the 24 hour race. The race will take place next weekend and the team will be flying out to Frankfurt tomorrow afternoon. They will arrive early Tuesday morning and take the short drive to Nürburg. Both Stu Jones and late addition to the driving line up, Simon Evans, will be making their Nürburgring 24 hour debuts. This means they are required to take part in a two day ‘new drivers’ course. Stu, a tarmac rally and club circuit privateer, reckons it’s a bit of a laugh that he will start the race on a level playing field with Evans, a full-time professional driver who is well known to the tight knit Australian rally community

Day one of the training course will be theory and day two will see track action, but in road cars only. Thursday is a free day for the team and if all goes well they will make the trek to nearby Cologne to check out the Toyota Formula 1 headquarters. Friday is a practice day. With around 230 cars taking part in the race finding clear track in the first 90 minute session will be tough! This is the only practice session during full daylight and the guys are expecting only two laps each. The ‘night’ session starts at 7pm and lasts for three and half hours and it is hoped they can squeeze in around six laps each. At least the long European summer evening should provide quite good light for most of the session. Learning the track in the dark would raise the degree of difficulty just a tad!

The race starts at 3pm on Saturday (11pm AEST) and finishes at the same time on Sunday. With any luck I’ll be able to provide a few real time updates as Stu and I have lined up a few times for SMS communication during the race.

For more detail on what is involved in sending an Australian team over for the Nürburgring 24 hour race, click HERE.