More street racing experience for Fabian Schiller
29. Juni 2015 Back to overview »

The annual visit to the Norisring in Nuremberg is traditionally one of the highlights of the FIA Formula 3 European Championship season. This year again didn’t disappoint, with a total attendance of 123,000 spectators over the weekend, who were treated to entertaining racing by the youngsters in the Formula 3 class. For German driver Fabian Schiller, racing for British team, West-Tec F3, it was his first outing at the 2.3 kilometres long street circuit. In the first race, he had to make a pit stop for a tyre change and ended up 26th. In the second and the third race, the protégé of the Deutsche Post Speed Academy finished 15th.

“Although the track is only 2.3 kilometres long and only has four corners, two hairpins and an S-combination, it is quite a challenge,” Fabian Schiller reported after his first laps of the track. “You get really close to the walls and the Armco barriers, but of course, the goal is to push it to the limits without getting any damage. That is not easy, but I like this kind of circuits.” Due to the short circuit and the size of the Formula 3 grid, the field was split up into two groups for free practice and qualifying, one for drivers with odd and one for drivers with even starting numbers. In his group, Schiller qualified ninth for the first race, but because his group was the fastest, he was still only 17th on the grid. “With my lap time, I would have been significantly higher up in the other group, but that is the way things work here,” he said.

In the first race, Schiller’s hopes of a good result were blown relatively quickly. “Right after the start, somebody ran into the back of my car and damaged my left rear tyre with his front wing. That caused a puncture, so I had to turn into the pits to have the tyre changed, which cost me valuable time. I drove the full lap on the floor of my car and slid straight on in the first corner. At a short circuit like the Norisring, you are one or two laps down straight away when you make a pit stop, so there wasn’t much more I could do,” Schiller commented after the race, in which he finished 26th, two laps down on the winners. The race was held in adverse conditions: a heavy downpour reduced visibility to almost zero. Schiller: “It was quite difficult, but not as bad as I expected. Driving in the rain is also part of the learning process. It was quite pleasing to see that I could keep up with the drivers who were in fourth, fifth or sixth place after my stop. The speed was good.”

In qualifying for the second and third race, it was a similar affair. “However, my speed was not that bad. One or two tenths faster, and I would have been in the top five of my group,” Schiller reported. “In the race, we had some issues with the water temperature in the engine that went up too high, so I lacked some engine power. I tried to save the engine and ran in high gears during the safety car interventions, but whenever I pushed, the temperature went up again. Therefore, I wasn’t really able to attack and finished 15th.”

In race three, things went slightly better for him. “I was driving with an old set of tyres, because we wanted to save some new tyres for test sessions. Initially, I made some mistakes and missed some braking points, perhaps also because track conditions were different to what we had before due to rain overnight. In the second half of the race, things went better and I could increase my speed,” said Schiller, who again finished in 15th place. “In general, this is not my favourite type of circuits, but as I said, it was good for the learning process. Next up is Zandvoort in The Netherlands in a fortnight, an old-school circuit that I am looking forward to!”