Rast triumphs through the Audi fire and smoke
Rene Rast put himself firmly back in DTM title contention with a double victory at Zolder, just as both his championship rivals Nico Muller and Robin Frijns endured their worst weekends of the season.
It wasn’t that Rast had slipped completely out of the championship battle ahead of the seventh round of the season, but a 47-point deficit to Muller in the face of Abt Audi domination meant that there was a risk the German wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap sufficiently to realistically remain in the hunt.
However, in a weekend that could play a defining role in deciding the destination of the crown, Rast was a class above the rest of the field, slashing the points deficit to just 10 and moving himself up to second in the standings.
The 33-year-old started off strongly in Belgium, qualifying his
Team Rosberg Audi on pole in damp conditions and then streaking clear of the field in a dry race, taking the chequered flag with almost 19 seconds in hand – the second-biggest winning margin of the season.
Sunday’s race two turned out to be trickier for the two-time champion, particularly after his Audi caught fire on the starting grid in an incident that could have led to a DNS. But after the mechanics managed to fix the car in time for the start, a daring Rast muscled
his Audi between the BMWS of Timo Glock and Sheldon van der Linde that had locked out the front row of the grid, avoiding any contact with the duo to vault into the lead.
The stranded car of Frijns on lap 11 could have potentially put his victory chances under threat, but Rast was able to dive into the pits before the safety car was deployed and emerged with his lead intact. From then on, there was little that could have prevented Rast from scoring his fourth victory of the season, becoming only the second driver after Muller’s Spa effort to complete a clean sweep of victories in a single round.
Rast’s Zolder success was made sweeter by a troubled weekend for his title rivals Frijns and Muller, with neither in a position to threaten him across the two races. Frijns, in particular, took a big blow to his title hopes when he crashed into the barriers in the narrow pit exit on Sunday, suffering terminal damage to his Audi. That incident triggered a safety car that caught out Muller, which meant he had to wait until later in the race to complete his mandatory pitstop, dropping to the lower reaches of the top 10. Ninth was by far his worst result of the year, having never ranked outside the top five in the opening six rounds of the campaign.
The root cause of Muller’s frustrating weekend was a lack of one-lap pace, as he struggled to match the leading drivers in both damp qualifying sessions, qualifying seventh each time. In the opener, he was able to recover to third, but he was running down in fifth on Sunday when Frijns’s pitstop led to a series of events that unravelled his race.