Vechta: Manuel Meier and Lena Siebert clinch German Championship with a perfect score

Rain was forecast for 10 pm at the Reiterwaldstadion in Vechta. And that’s exactly how it turned out. Just as the sidecar final got underway, it rained for a few minutes, but that was all. By then, Manuel Meier and Lena Siebert had undoubtedly established themselves as the clear favourites for the title, having secured four wins from four starts. And that’s exactly how it turned out.

The chairman of MSC Berghaupten, at the handlebars of the 500cc sidecar with start number 90, and his lightweight passenger from Melsungen-Röhrenfurt proved unbeatable in the four-lap final as well. But that required a re-run.

What had happened? In a race that, like all the others, featured breathtakingly thrilling action at the front of the field, Raphael San Millan and his passenger Benedikt Zapf had drifted too far out in the first lap in the bend before the start/finish line, got the sidecar caught in the airfences and crashed.

But it looked worse than it actually was. The team from MSC Berghaupten got off lightly, bringing to an end what had been a very unsatisfactory evening for them. Right in their first heat, they were unlucky when Oliver Wehrle, with Noah Schirmaier as his passenger, crashed into them, forcing the race to be restarted for everyone. In the re-run, San Millan and Zapf botched the start and were subsequently lucky not to crash whilst frantically trying to make up ground. In their next heat, they initially stalled at the start but then raced their way up through the field to finish in third place.

“If you’re in a mess, you’re in a mess,” groaned one observer amongst the roughly 5,000 spectators lining the approximately 540-metre-long sand track at the Reiterwaldstadion. Nicole Standke and, above all, her co-driver Alex Herrmann were even more unlucky, however. The North German rider made a spectacular false start in the very first heat, followed by a crash, and in her second race she was involved in an unfortunate collision with a rival. Herrmann was injured in the incident and had to be taken to hospital for a check-up. “That’s not how I’d imagined my farewell race,” Nicole Standke lamented later.

The two semi-finals were incredibly exciting. In the first, Meier and Siebert overtook the strong Berghaupten pair Achim Neuendorf and Johannes Schnaitter – who had been leading up to that point – on the final lap. Remarkably, San Millan (Neuendorf’s brother) and Zapf – who’d been struggling so far – finished third here. The second semi-final was even more thrilling. Here, the Track Cup winners Wehrle and Schirmaier led for three laps ahead of Brandhofer and Meijerink, before eventually having to concede defeat to the European champions.

All in all, it was a fantastic evening of racing, as is usually the case in Vechta, with a lively floodlit atmosphere. AC Vechta, led by sports director Uwe Fienhage, did a brilliant job here and treated the crowd to some fantastic track cycling with the German Sidecar Championships and the Long-Track Cup for B-class solo riders, a very strong field of Class I solo riders, plus youth races in the afternoon.

Results, Vechta, German Sidecar Championships:

Results: I-Solo Vechta (Germany):

Results of the Vechta (Germany) Long-Course Cup: