DTM STARS ROCK BRANDS HATCH
AUDI AND BMW SHARE THE HONOURS AT BRITISH BATTLEGROUND,
Two-time DTM champion Timo Scheider was not a popular man with Audi at Brands Hatch. Heading into the weekend, the ex-audi driver penned a column for broadcaster RAN that hit out at the manufacturer. “There are very, very high tensions among the drivers,” he wrote, before moving on to DTM championship leader Rene
Rast and his nearest rival Nico Muller. Criticising “political correctness”, Scheider believes the “truth was not told” when they claimed to have a friendly relationship.
But while Scheider’s comments made Audi motorsport boss Dieter Gass “laugh out loud”, Gass, Muller and Rast all admitted to tensions as the DTM heads into the home stretch where the German touring car championship’s notorious team orders begin to arise.
Regardless of how deep the tensions run, the DTM title fight is increasingly looking like a Rast versus Muller affair and Audi looked in a class of its own on Sunday at Brands Hatch. Rast led a top-eight qualifying lockout for the manufacturer, stunning BMW and baffling Audi as to how it had made such a sizeable step forward.
But Rast then made a poor getaway at the start of Sunday’s race, compromised by being unable to run his “best set” of tyres after picking up a puncture in parc ferme. He lost his lead to fellow front-row starter
Loic Duval on the run to Paddock Hill Bend, spending the early stages of the race in second. But the DTM title
favourite would return to the front when he breezed past Duval on the run to Hawthorns on the first lap.
Behind, Muller had begun to climb his way up the order from sixth after a strong start gained him places as he overtook Audi stablemates Mike Rockenfeller and Jamie Green. Muller moved up to second when he replicated Rast’s move on Duval to then begin his chase of Rast. But Muller’s bid to overhaul the leader took a hit when the pair both pitted at the end of lap 10 of 42.
Rast’s pitstop was straightforward, but problems fitting the rear-left tyre on Muller’s Audi RS5 DTM cost him five seconds. Returning in a net second place, once he cleared Robin Frijns and Duval while the pair completed their outlaps on cold tyres, Muller had a gap of 3.3s to make up to the race leader.
The battle then swung to-and-fro over the second half of the race, and a series of fast laps allowed Muller to close within 0.2s at the flag, but he proved unable to prevent Rast from taking his fourth win of 2019. Muller admitted to playing it safe against a team-mate, and at a track where overtaking is at a premium, meaning Rast holds a 37-point advantage heading into Lausitzring.
Audi’s Frijns completed the podium places in third, boosted by a longrunning battle for fourth between Philipp Eng and Rockenfeller. Eng had started ninth on the grid and ran a long-running first stint that allowed him to use a fresh rubber advantage in the latter stages to climb to fifth as BMW’S leading driver in a tricky race for the manufacturer.
BMW’S showing came in complete contrast to Saturday’s race, which had suggested that BMW’S Marco Wittmann would remain a thorn in the side of Audi during the title bid, even if the M4 DTM package appears to lack Audi’s engine power and reliability.
The crucial move came when polesitter Wittmann steered his BMW through a narrow gap caused by the early-stopping Green running wide at Paddock Hill Bend, opening up space for the two-time DTM champion to power past the Audi driver and then-net leader Rast as the pitstops began to shake out.
A slow lap from Wittmann late in the race allowed Rast to close to within three seconds and the Audi driver loomed large behind the BMW on the final lap. But Rast was unable to find a way past and crossed the line just 0.4s adrift of Wittmann.
Rast had put himself into position to hound Wittmann by picking off two Audi stablemates on the run to Hawthorns in quick succession following his mandatory pitstop, having lost places early on. He first passed Duval and then relegated
Muller to the final place on the podium.
But while Wittmann’s victory had taken the headlines, Saturday also featured the R-motorsport Aston Martin team leading a race on apparent merit, before several camera angles showed that Paul di Resta had jumped the start – fractionally.
Di Resta had given R-motorsport its second-best qualifying result of its debut campaign by placing his Vantage in fourth after the team reacted well to the changeable conditions on Saturday morning.
When Wittmann and fellow front-row starter Rast bogged down at the beginning, di Resta swept to the outside and passed the BMW driver into Paddock Hill Bend to lead.
Di Resta kept Wittmann behind him for 15 laps, but he was then required to serve a five-second time penalty at his mandatory pitstop that dropped him down the field before he eventually retired with an engine-related problem.
In footage shown to MN, di Resta’s Aston rolled slightly forward just before the lights went out, but the ex-formula 1 driver was adamant that it did not constitute a jumped start, as R-motorsport went on to secure another double-points finish on Sunday.