Zandvoort “huge fun” for Mattias Ekström

Double DTM champion Mattias Ekström described Race 2 at Zandvoort as “great fun”, despite finishing seventh. The 2004 and 2007 DTM champion lined up 16th for Race 2 at Zandvoort after a cable harness issue carried through from the Sunday morning warm-up session into qualifying.

Despite carrying the 25 kilogram success ballast on his Audi RS5 DTM as a result of Audi’s four wins from eight races in the opening rounds of the 2015 DTM season, Ekström fought back to seventh to finish as the best of the Audi drivers in Race 2 at Zandvoort.

“Today, I was very happy with my car,” said Ekström. “I had some tough duels with [Mercedes drivers] Pascal [Wehrlein] and Christian [Vietoris] that were huge fun.

Ekström is still second in the DTM championship standings, but is now level with Wehrlein on 76 points, who finished sixth.

The Swede’s seventh place finish saw him reduce the gap to five points in the standings to Audi stablemate Jamie Green who leads the championship on 81 points to Ekström’s 76.

Green was unable to score in either of the two races at Zandvoort.

Looking ahead to the next round at the Red Bull Ring in Austria on the weekend of August 2, Ekström added “it’s positive I was able to decrease the deficit in the standings and we’ll be able to reduce weight for the next two races at Spielberg.”

Adrien Tambay was the only other Audi driver to score after finishing ninth.

Despite managing to keep its lead in the 2015 drivers’ and manufacturers’ championship, Audi’s head of DTM, Dieter Gass, described the weekend as “difficult” for the Ingolstadt-based manufacturer.

“This was a very difficult weekend for us,” said Gass. “The performance weight no doubt had an influence, especially in qualifying.

“That we showed a clearly better performance in the second race on Sunday than we did on Saturday [in qualifying], and that we continue to lead the drivers’ and the manufacturers’ classifications is a positive.

“At the Red Bull Ring, the weight situation will be a lot more balanced.”