Antonio Albacete scored a victory in all the three Saturday free practice races. Ludovic and Markus Östreich alternately won the second place. David took longer to arrive by a few tenths of a second, ending fourth. A malfunctioning differential gear was part of the reason for his delays. Fortunately, it was swiftly replaced.
In timed practice it was mostly the organisers who failed, or more precisely technology failed them. Wrong numbers of laps were shown on the displays, and for some of them the computer added up times for several laps. Ludovic was in the lead for most of the time just before Östreich, Albacete and David. In the final minutes of timed practice, the Spaniard pushed himself into second place, while David had also been trying to break through. His effort came to a sudden halt after he slid off the track and had to stop. Afterward de didn't want to risk being disqualified for exceeding the set number of rounds, so he preferred to drive back into the garage. However, the final results of timed practice were decided only a few hours after the end of the race. FIA commissioners weighted all the vehicles several times and found out that Östreich's Volkswagen is several tens of kilos lighter than the prescribed weight! Could this be yet another strategy of the Deutsche Post team to outflank the Buggyra following the "tyres affair" from Barcelona? In any case David confirmed the dominance of the Buggyra team and Östreich was moved to the last starting position in the qualifying race.
The start of the qualifying race went well for everybody. Ludovic immediately came into lead just ahead of Albacete and David. Östreich maintained the fourth position just behind them. After a short while, two couples of trucks had formed, riding a short distance form each other. The order had not changed throughout all of the nine laps, in other words the first to arrive were the silver, red and blue Buggyra trucks, piloted by Ludovic, Albacete and David respectively. The yellow Volkswagens of Östreich a Drückenmüller came right after them.
The final race started very differently. All pilots on starting positions with even numbers happened to be the fastest (it even seemed they started too early, but the commissioners voiced no protest). Thus Albacete moved into lead trailed by Ludovic, Östreich, and David. After the third lap pairs of trucks had formed once again. David was driving faster than Östreich and after entering into the tenth lap he attacked his third position. However, his car skidded on a petrol slick and knocked over several cones along the track. Instead of seeing a warning sign about danger on track, he soon came to see a punishment sign saying STOP and GO. He dropped to the fifth position, and it stayed that way for the rest of the race. He couldn't hide his indignation afterwards. "Rather than warning me of the oil slick, they punish me. How unfair," he complained. In the end Ludovic understood that he was no match for Albacete, and leisurely settled for a second place. This brought him enough points to make him an overall frontrunner ahead of David and Albacete. So, after three races Buggyra are still in the lead.
