Between December 21, 2022 and January, 8, 2023 THR held two time trial events during its Christmas Break.

The Bellof Challenge

The first time trial event was held at the Nordschleife track using the Porsche 962C. The event attracted a total of 33 participants who were eager to set fast lap times on the iconic German circuit, driving a total of stunning 401 laps.

The Nordschleife is known for its demanding layout and unforgiving conditions, making it a true test of both driver ability and car setup. The track, which is located in the beautiful Eifel region of Germany, features over 20 kilometers of winding tarmac and more than 170 turns.
As the participants took to the virtual track, the competition was fierce and the lap times were close. In the end, it was Jayden HW who came out on top, setting a time of 6:05.783 to secure first place on the podium. In second place was meisterJäger, who finished just over five seconds behind the leader with a time of 6:10.964. Rounding out the podium was Felix789, who posted a time of 6:11.762.

The times set by the top finishers were quite impressive, evermore so it is worth noting that the first two drivers were even able to beat the Stefan Bellof's iconic lap from 1983. Bellof's record, which stands at an unbelievable 6:11.13, had been considered unbeatable for a long time, but these virtual racers proved that anything is possible with skill and determination.

The Brabham Challenge

The second time trial event was held on the Fonteny track with the 1967 F1 championship winning car Brabham BT24.

A total of 20 drivers participated in the event, driving a total of 172 laps. The top three finishers were separated by around 15 seconds. In the end, it was meisterJäger who took the top spot, setting a time of 8:20.660. In second place was Pete Bondurant, who finished with a time of 8:27.282, while Guayando rounded out the podium with a time of 8:36.534.
The Fonteny track is a 26km loop of real roads located in the French countryside of the Parc Naturel Régional du Morvan. It features a mix of fast straights, technical corners, and undulating hills, making it a challenging and diverse circuit, which tests a driver's versatility and car control skills. It's a true test of a driver's ability and requires a well-rounded approach to be successful.
The track is known for its challenging layout and varied terrain, which tests a driver's versatility and car control skills - a truly rewarding track. All finishers of this event proved that they have what it takes to excel on this demanding circuit.

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Congratulations to all participants and especially to the podium finishers of both events.
We hope the events brought to you some racing variaty during the usually very quiet holiday season.

Deutschlandring 4 Stunden Rennen - AC Legends GTC 60s

3rd Endurance Race by THR

Another year is almost in the books.
Covid is still here, but for many of us, life has returned to some semblance of normalcy in 2022.

In 2022 we finished 6 Chamionships:
GPL 5, ACL GTC, Audi 90 GTO, F1 1975, TCL 60s and F1 1991 in which we have driven almost 30.000 laps in 53 different cars on 35 different tracks.

On Top of that we had some exciting special events:
For example the marvelous 2.4 hours of Le Mans in which 4 communities fought for the win and Microlin did an amazing jo as our commentator.
Or the celebration race of THRs 4th Anniversary in which we drove a Full Length GP in the GPL cars at Hockenheim.

We have exceeded the number of 1.500 members in Discord.
Our Youtube Channel has 406 followers.
More than 355 users have subsribed to our website, and 384 people follow our Facebook News and some days ago we started a partnership with 3DRAP.

But in 2022 I also had a difficult time to get through, as organizing the Endurance race took quite a bit of energy and I fell into a bit of a hole for a few weeks where I had little interest in THR things.
But after some time the interest came back and we planned the coming weeks/months.

Currently we host two Time Attacks to fill the Christmas Break and our next Endurance Race is scheduled for the 22nd of January.
At the end of January we will start into a RSS Formula 1970 championship with 13 race weekends and one week later we start a 90s Stock Car championship with 6 race weekends.

I suspect that we will have a lot of fun together again in 2023.

At the end of this year I want to take the opportunity to thank you all.
The community is still growing, the starting grids are nearly always good filled and you try to help each other, when problems occur.

What stands out to me, is that many of us know each other for a long time now and when you have another driver around you during a race, you know how he drives, his strenghts and weaknesses. That feels almost like racing in a real life league.

Many thanks to you for being a member of THR.

I wish you a Merry Christmas, calm and relaxing holidays and a happy, healthy new year 2023!

See you on track next year!
pitman

To kick-off our partnership, 3DRAP provided one MOD.49 steering wheel for our THRs 4th Anniversary Race.

Eligible to participate in the raffle were all drivers who particpated in the 4th Anniversary Race and had already raced in at least 10 Main Events of THR.

Look who has won!

(Cause of stress right before Christmas, I had not enough time to double check the recording and missed to record the voice of the participants. Therefore, you have to imagine in your mind how everyone was cheering in the last seconds. And how happy the winner was. Sorry, next time I will also record the voices.)

Imagine doing SimRacing in a community where only vintage cars are driven on iconic tracks.
Imagine racing a Lotus 49, a Ferrari 312, a Lotus 98T or a McLaren MP4/4 - cars from the most iconic eras of racing history.
Still this has one immersion-breaking flaw: the wheel in your hands is a modern standard 30 cm wheel.

And now imagine that it could be different / it could be just right…

And this is where 3DRap comes into play!

Besides other fields of activity, 3D Rap offers high quality SimRacing products, such as Pedals, Shifters, Handbrakes, Wheels, Mods, etc.

But the products which fit best to what we do at THR is the awesome vintage wheel collection which can be used with Logitech (G25 / G27 / G29 / G920), Thrustmaster (T500rs / T300rs / TX / TS-PC / T-GT), OpenSimWheel and Fanatec (Podium- / Clubsport- / CSL- HUB).

Because of the vintage rims that 3DRAP makes, we had some nice talks over the past weeks and have entered into a partnership, that we are very excited about.

It was a bit cold on May 28, 1983, when Stefan Bellof competed for the qualifying of the ADAC 1000-kilometer race at the Nürburgring as part of the sports car world championship. His car: The Porsche 956 K with the chassis number 007; first equipped with 13-inch wide rims on the front axle. More camber and modified steering levers ensure better steering behavior. A distance of 20.835 kilometers per lap was to be mastered at that time. Less than 2 km shorter than usual. Due to the new construction of the Grand Prix circuit and the pit system, a connector with a short pit lane behind grandstand T13 was created. No one guessed that on that weekend a record would be set, which would stand more than 35 years later.	After becoming World Champion of Drivers in 1959 and 60, at the wheel of the revolutionaries Cooper-Climax, Jack Brabham joined with his countryman, engineer and race cars designer Ron Tauranac, to found, in 1960, the Motor Racing Developments Ltd. The MRD presented its first car, a Formula Junior, in the next summer, and quickly evolved to become a great builder of competition cars for customers. In 1962 Jack Brabham left Cooper to drive his team's cars and MRD presented its first F1, BT3 (BT from Brabham-Tauranac). Ron designed the cars and Jack drived and developed them.
The former Formula 1 driver Jochen Mass ends his qualifying with a time of 6:16.850 min, as one of the last drivers Stefan Bellof starts on his lap. Bellof does the unthinkable in a Werksporsche, a fabulous time of 6:11.13 min, 5 sec faster than teammate Mass. The reigning Formula One World Champion Keke Rosberg, even takes half a minute longer on his tour of the Green Hell. Bellof was at an average speed of 202 km / h - faster than any racer before. Despite two small mistakes, as he would then say, typically relaxed.	In 1966 Jack Brabham and Denny Hulme, participated in 19 races, 10 of which were of the F1 World Championship, having won 6 and allowed Jack Brabham to win, in 1966, his third Drivers' Championship and the first title of Constructors for the brand. Jack Brabham was also, and until today, the only driver to win a race and a F1 World Championship at the wheel of a car with his name.
RECORD LAP NORDSCHLEIFE: 6: 11,13 MIN Date: May 28, 1983 Driver: Stefan Bellof Vehicle: Porsche 956K chassis no. 007 Lap length: 20.832 km Lap time: 6:11,13 min Average speed: 202 km / h	BRABHAM BT24 Races: 21 Wins: 3 Podiums: 12 Poles: 0 Fastest Laps: 1 Constructors Championship: 1 (1967) Drivers Championships: 1 (1967) Denny Hulme
In the race on Sunday, the second Werksporsche with Jacky Ickx and Jochen Mass crossed the finish line as the winner. Stefan Bellof had to park his Porsche in the section Pflanzgarten after an accident in lap 19. He made a looping and his car came to rest at what is called the Bellof-S since 2013.. Since this record, the history of Stefan Bellof and the history of the Nordschleife are inseparable.	In 1967 Brabham introduced the BT24, which was more compact and lighter than its predecessors. It was powered by a new and lighter Repco engine, with a block manufactured by the brand and with the exhaust pipes positioned centrally, which allowed the engine to reach 330CV, and left more space for the rear suspension. Taking advantage of the youth problems of the also new Lotus 49, Jack Brabham and Denny Hulme won 3 races and, for the brand, the World Championship, with Hulme overtaking his colleague and boss to win his only driver.
Bellof´s record stood for 35 years until the Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo broke it. But the 6:11.13 is still the fastest laptime driven in an official event. Can you beat Bellof´s time?	The Brabham BT24 never drove at Fonteny, but we chose the car because despite winning the titles in 1967, it is chanceless in the GPL mod and therefore mostly ignored. Will you master the car/track combination best?

On Saturday the 15th of December 2018 we had our first THR race.
This means that THR will be 4 years old in a few days and we have experienced a lot in these four years:

First Race

Our first race was held with the GPL Mod at Silverstone and we had 4 Racers on track. Our race format in the first weeks was to run as many 20-minute races in a row as we were able to.
Our first regular driver was Ben Barson. Thanks a lot for showing that the community idea was not that bad.

Our AC server

The first races were hosted on Duderei's home server.
But we quickly moved to a professional hoster.
The first entry in our STracker Database is from 2018-12-25.
After that we changed the hoster 2 times until we moved to a rented LinuxMachine (thanks franglais) which runs the ServerManager and 5 AC-Servers.
In the next weeks we plan to move to new more powerful server to (hopefully) get rid of the LagSpikes we experienced in the last weeks.

Races in THR

Over the 4 years, 974 different drivers have raced on our servers.
We have driven tens of thousands of laps and countless kilometers.

We had around 180 official events, 58 weekday races and many fun races.
We have completed 19 championships and the next upcoming are already planned.
Our former champions can be seen on the Wall of Champions.

Discord

The Discord Server has been set up on 2018-12-07.
Our first member besides Dude and me joined on 2018-12-14.
Currently we have 1,562 Members. Some of them are very quiet or bots, but no matter what time of day, there are always more than 200 members online.
What I find crazy is that I have written nearly 23,000 messages in our THR Discord. The number of PMs are also high, but I can´t count them.

Website

The Website followed a little later. The first entry is from 2019-01-17.
It contains 200 pages and 290 news and I wrote more than 88,000 Words.
Funfact: You will need nearly 6 hours to read them all.

To represent our races we have made 183 posters.
Our Website has more than 130,000 visits and more than 492,000 views.

The most successfull page ist the news page with 59,000 views, followed by the tracks page, the GPL Mod page, and the AC Legends page.

Youtube

Nearly 1 year after our foundation we started our Youtube-Channel on 2019-02-17.
At first we started with a short PromoVideo which was made by Bo Stamper.
Another year later we started to stream our races and with the help of Klopstick and Ted we produced another brilliant PromoVideo which has been watched 1.285 times since then.
To celebrate the start of our fifth GPL championship, Greg produced another stunning video which has been watched 590 times until today.

In 2022 Evgeny showed up and produced an awesome Cintematic about our THR GTC 60s championship, which was viewed 2,908 times.

The channel contains more than 319 videos/streams and has 398 followers.
It was visited 31,656 times and more than 2.800 hours of our videos were viewed.

Social Media

Besides of the above we have a Facebook site, which get not much attention from our side, but has 344 followers, cause of the website news which get posted on Facebook automatically.
Also an unused Twitch Channel, an equally unused Instagram Account and some other cool things which I might have forgotten.

Shop

We opened our own THR shop on 12/21/2022.
The idea behind the store was to send prizes to our championship winners / participants.

Since the opening we have donated 27 prices to our members and on top of that sold around 25 products.
It doesn't sound like much 😉 but those who have ordered are very satisfied with the quality of the products.

If you plan to buy something and need help with it:
https://thracing.de/thr-shop-help/

Special Thanks

I want to send out a very special thank you to the members of the Orga - Group.
margar, Flashor, Flow, franglais and Valentin.
I appreciate our meetings and the decisions we make.
You take work from me and you also support in balancing, track testing and many other things.
You are a great help for me!!!

I would also like to thank the members of THR Race Control. For many members it is not visible how much time you invest, but I can assure you that it is many hours.
It's great that you guys take the job so seriously!

A special thanks also to Evgeny for creating such great THR videos last year.
I have watched the cinematic a dozen times and I am really looking forward to the cinematic about the F1 1991 championship!

And I bet I forgot to mention other supporters.
Therefore, I thank everyone who has supported THR's work.

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The most important part of THR > YOU

But the most important thing is the community that has grown up around THR.

Thank you all for being members of THR and for making THR what it is!

It is also nice to see, that you help each other in Discord and that you respect each other.
I appreciate that very much!

I would also like to thank those who have made a donation via Paypal or started to be a Patreon of THR!
That's phenomenal!


Your [THR] pitman

We plan to celebrate the 4th anniversary with a full length GP.

And the upcoming Schedule looks like this.

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Fanatec has released this year's Black Friday deals: https://blackfriday.fanatec.com/

If you plan to buy Fanatec products, it would bei great if you can use the THR affiliate link to enter the Fantatec website:

https://www.fanatec.com/?utm_medium=FAP+Banner&utm_source=5ffc5839c979d&utm_campaign=General+Links&a_aid=5ffc5839c979d