Jamie Green heads to Lausitzring hoping to repeat last year’s performance
The Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters visits the Lausitzring this weekend, host of the third round of the 2016 season. The Audi Sport team is ready to do their best to repeat last year’s result, when they dominated both races.
Jamie Green dominated the event at the Lausitzring last year, scoring a blasting pole position, leaving the field over a second behind, and achieving two strong victories. The Ingolstadt cars occupied the top four positions on Saturday and the top five on Sunday.
The picture looks rather different this season, with the two events so far having shown a much levelled field. For Dieter Gass, Head of DTM at Audi Sport, expecting to repeat last year’s performance would be a mistake: “It’s become nearly impossible to make any predictions. An assessment is extremely difficult this year. We’ve already been seeing a number of surprises in the first two events. We’re determined to deliver a similarly strong performance as last year at the Lausitzring, but it would be totally wrong to travel to Lausitz with too much self-confidence.”
A pole position and a podium finish for the Green at Spielberg have returned him to the foreground as a potential championship contender. The Briton holds the track record in the circuit located South-East of Berlin, a down payment of what the driver from Team Rosberg hopes to achieve this weekend.
So far this season, the Audi RS 5 DTM has shown itself to be the strongest car on the track, despite racing incidents stopping the Ingolstadt manufacturer from reaping their rewards with points. The squad had a difficult start in Hockenheim, but was competitive again in Austria, with Mattias Ekström having a recovering race, from 11th to second, on Sunday. The Swede has won twice at the Lausitzring, where he visited a DTM podium for the first time 16 years ago.
The Audi RS 5 DTMs will start the weekend with a weight of 1,120 kg, which will be recalculated after Saturday’s qualifying session. The Ingolstadt squad is currently second in the Manufacturers’ standings, 95 points behind BMW. Team Abt Sportsline’s Edoardo Mortara is the best placed Audi driver in the championship in second place, just three points short of the lead.
The on track action at the Lausitzring starts on Friday afternoon at 16:30 CEST, for the first free practice session.
