Difference between revisions of "Dietrich Anger"

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Dietrich Anger

Nationality	Swiss
Born	26th June 1958 Bern, Switzerland
Current Team	FSK Racing
Car Number	56
Former Teams	N/A
Races	12
Championships	0
Victories	0
Podiums	0
Points	1
Pole Positions	0
Fastest Laps	0
First Race	2001 Prost Grand Prix of Australia
First Victory	N/A
Last Victory	N/A
Last Race	2001 Prost Grand Prix of Germany
Best Finish	N/A

Dietrich Anger (b. 26th June 1958 Bern, Switzerland) is a Swiss motorsports steward and occasional racing driver. He drove for FSK Racing in the 2001 Prost GP season. Before this, he acted as the Chief Safety Officer of the Life GP Series.

Early career

Anger had been interested in motorsports ever since he first saw a documentary about the 1955 Le Mans disaster on TV at the age of 12. While this made him very suspicious about actually competing, he did get interested in the safety of the sport and after high school he quickly applied for training to become a licensed steward at the few motorsport events allowed and held in his native country. Many of these events were hillclimbing, one of the most popular forms of racing in Switzerland as it was legal due to not having cars competing against one another simultaneously, but instead against the clock. At one point in the 1980s he accidentally promised to take part in one of these events during a drunken night out. Being a man of his word he finally sat in a race car for the first time in 1986, at the ripe age of 28. He finished dead last, almost half a minute behind the next-slowest competitor, but it did spark a certain interest towards racing in him and eventually he took part as a competitor in at least one event per year from 1986 to 1990, whilst also working as a steward.

Life GP Series

In late 1990 a Swiss company called Finanz-Sichereit Konglomerat started to prepare their organization to start a new racing series called Life GP Series in the spring of 1991. As everything else started to be finalized, they noticed to be short of a chief safety officer. As all people who had any previous experience from such job demanded a substantial monthly salary on top of having their travels and other needs paid for in advance, the company decided to approach the most experienced regular stewards instead. As it turned out, Anger was the only one to agree for a very meager salary on top of having his work-related expenses covered, being happy to have a regular job.

Anger worked with the series until 1995, before he was fired due to being overly strict in some of his rulings, which made him very unpopular in the paddock. As he could not find another job he fell to alcoholism, and at one low point he also sold his racing suit and helmet, which he had previously held in high regard, just to get more booze.

Prost GP Series

In 2001, FSK branched out to the recently-announced Prost GP Series. For the first car they signed British RTCC veteran Nathan Nurmester, but seemingly no-one was willing to take the second seat due to the bad reputation of the car used in the series, the infamous Prost AP03. Being in a hurry to find another driver, they went through their personnel files and found out that Dietrich Anger, their former employee, had previous racing experience, albeit very little. As time was running out they quickly located him in a bar in Bern, dragged him to a plane, flew to Australia for the inaugural round of the season, gave him a second-hand set of a racing suit and helmet and made him sit in the car for the first practice session. He quickly learned how to keep the car on the road, but speed was lacking and in his first outing he only qualified third-last, over seven seconds off the pace while Nurmester was 9th. In the race he was further humiliated when the brakes of his car failed early on while his team mate went on to finish second. Mechanical unreliability proved to be a teething problem, and neither car finished at the next two rounds. Anger got his first finish at Mugello with 13th place, followed by another at Jerez in 14th, but he was still sorely lacking speed. In Austria he retired again, but in Scotland he made a great recovery from a poor qualifying and eventually finished 8th, his first points finish. Three consecutive retirements, all due to mechanical woes, followed in the British, English and French GPs. He also retired in the Dutch GP due to an engine failure, but completed enough laps to be classified. The German GP brought him a fifth consecutive retirement, despite all the money the team had put into developing reliability.

Complete Prost GP Results

* Season in progress
† Did not finish, but was classified due to completing more than 90% of race distance.