St. Wendel, Germany – The fourth round of the 2025 ADAC Opel Electric Rally Cup brought another weekend full of ups and downs for the Infypower chargebyte e-Rally Team. The opening day of the rally once again showed just how demanding the stages of this DRM event can be. On the timesheets, the team initially found itself in the lower third of the standings. The final stage of Friday, an 18-kilometer loop stage called “Windpark” featuring a massive jump, turned into pure chaos when several cars caught up to each other and had to overtake on the narrow course. Wittenbeck and Kugler were also caught in the mess. “At one point we had to put half the car into the grass to brake, and then we had another car ahead of us throwing up gravel, which completely blocked our visibility in the dust,” said Kugler. The day ended on a disappointing P11 out of 14 starters.
Saturday, however, told a different story. With multiple sixth-fastest stage times, the duo steadily fought their way forward, ultimately finishing the rally in P7. Co-driver Maximilian Kugler summed it up: “Overall, I’m very happy with our performance. Of course, it’s a bit frustrating that we just missed out on sixth place, but we’re taking a really positive feeling into the next event in France.” Heading into the last four stages, sixth place was still 10.1 seconds away, but by the end of the rally, the gap had been reduced to just 4.5 seconds. Particularly impressive was the pace improvement: while the team had been 1.45 seconds per kilometer slower than the leaders on Friday, they closed the gap to just 0.91 seconds per kilometer on Saturday. A key factor behind this progress was tire management. After struggling in previous rallies to find the right pressure, everything clicked this weekend. “We managed to keep the tires in the perfect window, and that really helped us deliver consistently strong stage times,” explained driver Johannes Wittenbeck.
Even if the final result doesn’t look spectacular on paper, the team is satisfied with its progress. Wittenbeck added: “We’ve clearly improved compared to the second half of the 2024 season. The only difference is that the overall pace in the Cup this year has gone up so much that it’s harder to see that improvement in the results. The level of competition in this series is just incredibly high. But that’s exactly the challenge we want. That’s why we’re here.” Thanks to their performance at the Saarland-Pfalz Rallye, the team reclaimed 6th place in the championship standings, currently tied on points with the Austrian duo Marcel Neulinger and Jakob Ruhsam. Next up for the Bavarian rally team is the Rallye Mont-Blanc Morzine in the first week of September, where they aim to build on last year’s strong performance.