Jan Magnussen won at Jyllandsringen

This coming weekend Jan Magnussen and Casper Elgaard will be fighting each other at Le Mans in the GT1 class at the wheel of a Corvette and Aston Martin respectively, but this Sunday they were also battling each other, when round three of the Danish Touringcar Championship took place at FDM Jyllandsringen. Here Jan Magnussen took the chequered flag in front of Casper Elgaard and rising star Michael Outzen.

Casper Elgaard had qualified for pole position in the final, but he was being followed closely by Jan Magnussen, who was far more competitive than previously this year. After three laps the two BMW drivers were virtually running bumper to bumper, and midway through lap nine of the 13 lap final, they collided, when Jan Magnussen hit the side of Casper Elgaard during an overtaking attempt.

”There was a gap which I went for, but then suddenly the gap wasn’t there any longer, as the door had been slammed, and then I ran out of tarmac,” Jan Magnussen said after the race.

The collision meant that the two rivals swabbed places, but immediately afterwards Jan Magnussen was sentenced to go through the penalty lane, although this did not effect the positions at the front of the field.

“I got a gap big enough to go through the penalty lane without Casper passing me, and that just proves how fast our car was today,” Jan Magnussen said. “It was really nice. We were very, very fast in the final, and we would also have been fast during qualification heat 2, had we chosen a proper tyre pressure.”

Casper Elgaard finished in second place, but was fuming over the fact that the penalty that Jan Magnussen was given, did not have any effect.

“Jan takes a chance, hits me hard, sends me off course and wrecks my car, but he gets a penalty that doesn’t cost him anything. That is really inappropriate,” the triple DTC champion said. “We do all take our chances as a racing driver. Sometimes you are successful, sometimes you are not. We all know that the penalty have to be appropriate. There is no idea in given a penalty that doesn’t have any effect.”

Jan Magnussen was also in the running for a win in qualification heat 2, but he never managed to find a way around Tom Pedersen. The BMW 320i E46 driver took the first DTC race win of his career and thus for the second round in succession a heat had been won by a privateer.

“It’s my best result so far. I really hadn’t expected it. I am really happy to have finished with Jan Magnussen right behind me, ‘cause he is a driver who is good and people know that,” Tom Pedersen said.

Before the weekend at FDM Jyllandsringen Michel Nykjær was leading the championship by a single point from John Nielsen, but the Seat Leon driver actually managed to extend that lead even though he both had races with luck and lack of it.

“I really hadn’t expected that the weekend would end like this,” Michel Nykjær said, having won qualification heat 1 and retired from the second following a collision. “We hadn’t expected this kind of result with 40 kg of success ballast in the car, but still I haven’t driven a car that was so good for so long like this one.”