Photo: DTM Media

Edoardo Mortara charges through the field to sixth place

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Edoardo Mortara was the best finisher for Audi Sport at today’s race at the Moscow Raceway. The Italian made the most after a difficult qualifying session to finish sixth and reignite his championship charge.

The Ingolstadt squad had problems getting their tyres to work, resulting in a poor qualifying session where their best placed driver was Nico Müller in 13th place. Championship contenders Edoardo Mortara and Jamie Green started 18th and 20th respectively.

Mortara gained five positions during the first lap of the race, and then gradually worked his way through the pack, pulling Jamie Green with him. However, the Briton lost out with two drive -through penalties. At the chequered flag, Mortara was sixth, only 0.067 seconds shy of Mercedes’ Robert Wickens and was followed by fellow Audi drivers Nico Müller, Adrien Tambay and Mattias Ekström.

The Italian driver from Team Abt Sportsline was reasonably satisfied with the result: “It was a good race for me. I gave my best. Initially, I was struggling quite a bit with the new set of tires. But then grip came and I was able to close the gap to the guys in front of me. I tried to put pressure on them and that worked out pretty well. Obviously, having had a number of Audi cars around me helped today too. That was good teamwork and a nice feeling”, said Mortara.

In the championship table, Jamie Green still holds third position despite not scoring today, with a total of 104 points, 26 adrift from leader Marco Wittmann. Edoardo Mortara is next up, with 100 points to his account.

Audi Sport managed to save a weekend where didn’t have any advantage over their competitors, leaving Moscow in second place in the manufacturers’ table with 390 points, 46 behind BMW Motorsport.

Dieter Gass, Head of DTM for Audi Sport, is aware there are issues to be resolved: “We didn’t manage to get the tires to work precisely the way they should have in qualifying. The right compromise between a fast lap in qualifying and the long race distance is difficult sometimes. We need to carefully analyse this.”

“Following our truly catastrophic qualifying, we at least managed to bring four cars into the points. Some of our drivers were very fast for long stretches. Edo drove a superb race. He battled from the beginning to the end and made no mistakes. But obviously we can’t be happy with our overall results today”, concluded Gass.