Mercs dominate on DTM’S UK return
In an era of DTM notorious for inconsistency from one day to the next, one factor – one team – remained constant on the series’ much-anticipated return to Brands Hatch: Mercedes.
Mercedes head Ulrich Fritz had been cautious pre-weekend about the “first real unknown” of the season, particularly given that the DTM’S return to the UK after five years would take place on Brands Hatch’s Grand Prix layout for the first time. On a new circuit for the manufacturers and, perhaps more pertinently, many of the drivers, those were valid concerns – especially since Friday’s traditional practice sessions were shoehorned into the start of the schedule on Saturday.
But Fritz needn’t have worried.
DTM pole positions haven’t quite been like London buses for Daniel Juncadella, but, having required 64 attempts to land his first, his wait of three races to secure a second can’t have played on his mind half as much. As one of only three drivers to have competed on the Grand Prix loop in the past two years, Juncadella was always likely to be a contender on Saturday.
But Juncadella had not converted his maiden pole into victory at the Norisring in June. And he looked like he’d missed out again when he was jumped immediately by Lucas Auer and Rene Rast at the start of Saturday’s first race, despite feeling that he launched well from the Brabham Straight’s sloped right-hand-side pole slot. Could it be that the gradient acts as a hindrance?
“I really think it does,” said Juncadella. “I don’t want to be the only one picking it out but three times I’ve started from pole here and three times I’ve lost the lead. It’s like starting side by side with second place. If you get a good start you should be able to go through but I was surprised because I didn’t feel I had a bad pullaway; I just lost traction at some point.”
Juncadella swiftly made his way back into second when Rast went aggressive and pitted his Audi at the end of the first lap, and he was right on Mercedes team-mate Auer’s tail in second place when he made his stop on lap seven. Rejoining ahead of BMW man Augusto Farfus, Juncadella was fast enough over the next two laps to steal the net lead from Auer at Graham Hill Bend when Auer emerged from the pits, squirming about on cold tyres. Hard work done, Juncadella settled into a comfortable rhythm at the front and eased away to win by eight seconds.
“I’ve been through quite a lot this year, at some point when I had the accident [Juncadella broke his collarbone in a mountain-bike crash] I didn’t expect to be racing this season, because you don’t know how slow or how quick the recovery will be,”
he said. “It could have been easy for the team to just say, ‘Stay out for half a season’, so to be racing was special. It’s obviously the best day of my DTM career and one of the best days of my racing career.”
Farfus executed a brilliant strategy to end up second, having followed Juncadella through past Auer. Given his most recent race on the GP loop was in 2010, Farfus couldn’t claim to have contemporary experience of the extended circuit but admitted his track knowledge “certainly helps”. His result was set up by a brilliant opening-lap pass on fellow BMW driver Philipp Eng, but despite clearing Auer he had no answer to Juncadella’s pace.
Auer wasn’t too far back in third, but he spent the majority of the race post-stop with an eye on his mirrors. Rast lurked in the background until he had to back off in the final 10 laps after “suffering a lot” with tyre wear while following the Mercedes. Eng – who drove the circuit in 2017 – was fifth in his RMR M4, holding off a late charge from Mercedes’ points leader Gary Paffett in the process.
Paffett’s run suggested that those without recent experience of the longer layout were catching up and, sure enough, come qualifying the next day their disadvantage had been nullified.
Sunday’s second race featured an entertaining and race-long squabble for the lead, but it was effectively won – or lost – at the start. Eventual winner Paul
di Resta felt he could have secured pole, but perhaps it was for the best he did not. Launching better than Paffett from second, di Resta clung on around the outside of his Mercedes stablemate down through Paddock Hill and then Druids to secure first.
Paffett stopped short of blaming his grid slot for losing the lead, but suggested he felt at a disadvantage.
“I’m not going to say that’s the reason
[for di Resta beating him to the first corner], but it’s not nice,” he said. “It’s quite an angle on the track, and actually on P1 you’re starting to go uphill slightly. I did a start earlier on in practice and I got some wheelspin, so I was more cautious on the start – probably too cautious – off the grid, but the whole grid here is not nice.”
A first-lap incident involving Auer and Robin Frijns, and which also claimed plenty of Farfus’s front bodywork, resulted in an early safety car. Di Resta slowed the pack up to a snail’s pace before the restart, and that tactic worked perfectly. He leapt away when racing resumed to swoop into Paddock Bend unchallenged as Paffett resisted Pascal Wehrlein. Paffett pitted eight laps into the race, but the effect of the undercut was nullified when di Resta stopped himself the following lap and emerged ahead. From there, the gap between the pair never exceeded a second (save for on the final lap), but Paffett equally never got within proper striking distance of the leader.
2010 champion di Resta had been nowhere on Saturday, although he’d insisted his finishing position of 16th belied the real performance of his C63. So his pace was something of a surprise 24 hours later.
“It was identifying one thing on the car that my engineer saw in the data,” said di Resta, who ultimately ended up a comfortable winner. “Because it was a two-day event, you don’t get any running on Friday, so we had no time to change it.”
His cause was aided in the latter stages by Paffett having to temper his attack as the weekend’s most impressive performer, Rast, closed in on the runaway Mercedes pair. Frustrated a day earlier that his early stop hadn’t paid off, Rast again had reason to feel aggrieved when his ambitious attempts to pass Wehrlein around the outside of Druids on the restart resulted in him being shuffled off the circuit and dropping to fifth.
For all Rast’s annoyance (“the driving behaviour of Pascal is making me a bit upset”), it cost him little when he dived for the pits on lap six. That allowed his Audi to jump the Merc of Wehrlein anyway, effectively settling the squabble. Without the threat of the tyre-drop-off issues that had affected him a day earlier, Rast settled into what he called a “very good” rhythm to catch the leaders, spending the final eight laps within a second of Paffett’s shadow.
“I was surprised by the pace we had, especially at the end,” said Rast. “I was expecting them to go away after half the race but actually it was the other way round – I was catching them, even without DRS. I was hoping for some mistakes, or that Gary ran out of DRS, but I think he had one left, so he managed it very well.”
Reigning champion Rast is unquestionably a step ahead of his counterparts as Audi continues to agonise over getting the best from its 2018 package. But drive of the day could arguably have gone to another from the marque’s roster, had Jamie Green not encountered late dramas. Up from 11th on the grid – his third best qualifying effort of the season – to fourth in the opening laps, Green inherited first when the leaders made their stops. He would lead more of the race than di Resta before pitting with nine laps left.
But Green admitted that was probably a lap too late, having noticed his left-rear tyre pressure dropping. The Team Rosberg driver then lost time in the pits with a lengthy stop that meant instead of emerging in a secure fourth, he was immediately passed by Wehrlein as he rejoined and had to scramble to stay ahead of leading BMW contender Marco Wittmann. That involved a brusque defensive move exiting Graham Hill Bend, in which Green swept across the front of Wittmann’s M4, earning himself a drivethrough penalty, which denied him the chance to score what would have been his best result of the year.
Wittmann survived his altercation with Green (who crossed the line well outside the points in 15th) and went on to finish fifth, half a second clear of the second
Audi of Mike Rockenfeller. Eng had another productive run to seventh and was the second of two BMW drivers to score, beating Saturday frontrunners Juncadella and Auer, whose eighth and ninth places exemplified how well the rest of the field had caught up overnight.
If Fritz was worried about the risks
Brands Hatch offered, there can surely be little to faze his squad between now and the end of the season. The sum total of the weekend’s races barely affected the title race – Paffett extended his lead over di Resta by two points – but the gulf to the rest only grew as Mercedes strengthened its grip on the title race in its swansong year.