Great satisfaction for Jamie Green: following bad luck on Saturday, the Brit scored a commanding win in the DTM race at the Lausitzring on Sunday in front of a 67,500 strong crowd.
After 43 laps, he took the chequered flag as the race winner, 6.2 seconds ahead of his fellow Audi driver Mattias Ekström, who used an extreme strategy to move up from eighth place on the starting grid to second at the finish. Mercedes-AMG driver Robert Wickens, who had started the race from pole position, still managed to bring third place home.
After a difficult race on Saturday, the Sunday race was the total opposite for Jamie Green. With third place on the grid, the initial situation was much better and so was the result from the race. “We are having a really hard time in qualifying,” Green admitted. “In the race, on the other hand, things are going much better. That was great fun for me.” With his second victory of the season, Green also set things straight again in the drivers’ standings: second place after four races, 16 points down on leader Auer (69 points), who was having a hard time today. In qualifying, the Austrian was unable to do any better than 15th place. In the race, the 22-year-old worked his way up to finish tenth.
Mattias Ekström in particular provided plenty of excitement. The Swede opted for a very courageous strategy and already came in for his pit stop after one lap. Having started from eighth place on the grid, that initially got him out of traffic and he drove his own race. With most of the drivers having completed their stops around the halfway point of the race, Ekström showed his skills in handling the tyres and kept them alive until the end. “I lost time yesterday when I came in after five laps,” Ekström explained. “Therefore, I suggested to dig even deeper today. My team wasn’t sure whether or not that would work out, but I was.”
Mike Rockenfeller mirrored Ekström’s move and also stopped after only one lap. With these tactics, he made up six places and finished fifth behind DTM veteran Gary Paffett (Mercedes-AMG). Nico Müller and René Rast rounded out the strong performance by Audi in sixth and seventh place.
In the Sunday race, the BMW drivers failed to live up to the expectations. Only Maxime Martin and Marco Wittmann managed to score points in eighth and ninth place respectively.
After the spectacular events at Hockenheim and the Lausitzring, the first DTM round outside of Germany is scheduled from 16-18 June. Near the Hungarian capital of Budapest, the Hungaroring will be hosting the fifth and sixth race of the season.
