Son en Breugel, Netherlands – The second round of the 2025 ADAC Opel Electric Rally Cup ended with a sobering result for the Infypower chargebyte e-Rally Team: Johannes Wittenbeck and co-driver Maximilian Kugler finished 9th out of 12 competing teams at the ELE Rally. This event is known for its fast, flat asphalt sections, but also for its gravel segments featuring so-called Fech Fech – an especially fine, sandy dust that settles like powdered sugar when dry, robbing the tires of any grip. Already on Friday evening, it became apparent that the duo could not match the strong pace they had shown in Sulingen. Saturday morning brought more challenges: during the first stage on a military base, a slow puncture caused significant time loss – a serious handicap on such a grip-sensitive, technically demanding course. Then, midday rain turned the Fech Fech sections into a treacherous mud bath that caught out many drivers – Wittenbeck and Kugler among them. They struggled to recover lost time in the overall classification.
While the penultimate stage was run in heavy rain, the final Power Stage – a city course through Son – began to dry out. The team showed their fighting spirit one last time in pursuit of valuable championship points awarded on the Power Stage. “We still had one dry tire as a spare,” co-driver Kugler explained. “We mounted it front-right for the many left-hand corners.” The gamble paid off: with a strong 5th place time on the 10.7-kilometer stage, the pair not only scored one extra championship point but also closed a 16-second gap to 8th place. In the end, they missed the higher position by just 2.6 seconds after 124 kilometers of rallying.
Their total time of 1:30:39.6 still left them over three minutes behind the winning Spanish duo Álex Español and Borja Odriozola, who extended their championship lead. Johannes Wittenbeck reflected on the weekend: “I wasn’t in race mode mentally, couldn’t fully focus and extract the maximum. And that’s exactly what you need to keep up at this level. But weekends like this just happen sometimes.” Still, Wittenbeck and Kugler take valuable lessons from their time in the Netherlands. The next round of the ADAC Opel Electric Rally Cup takes them to the Vosges Mountains in France – and the team is determined to bounce back, aiming to return to their Sulingen form and fight again for top positions.