Jean Alesi fastest in warm-up

Audi’s paper boat race on Friday was followed by a power boat race on Sunday morning. Warm-up of the DTM at Zandvoort in the Netherlands started off in pouring rain and was a huge challenge for the 20 drivers. The fastest lap in the “swim training” was established by a veritable rain specialist, Jean Alesi. The Frenchman took his AMG-Mercedes C-Class from last year to a lap time of 1.49.703 minutes on the 4.307 kilometres long track. Behind Alesi, Tom Kristensen also proved his rain qualities with the Audi A4 DTM in second place. The Dane, who is equal on points with Bruno Spengler in second place of the championship standings behind Bernd Schneider, was 0.046 seconds down on Alesi. Schneider and Spengler ended the warm-up in fifth and ninth place respectively.

Two times’ Formula 1 world champion Mika Häkkinen proved to be strong in the rain after having scored his maiden DTM victory in similar conditions at Spa-Francorchamps in 2005. With a personal best time of 1.49.817 minutes, the Finn was 0.114 seconds slower than Alesi and ended the 30 minutes’ warm-up session in third place. Martin Tomczyk was fourth in the warm-up.

While the more experienced drivers topped the time sheets in the adverse conditions, others had their difficulties with the huge amounts of water and the aquaplaning as a result thereof. Especially braking for the Tarzan corner at the end of the main straight proved to be difficult. Frank Stippler (Audi) and Nicolas Kiesa (Audi), Susie Stoddart (Mercedes-Benz) and Vanina Ickx (Audi) all testified to this. To the relief of the team principals, their respective DTM race cars from Audi and Mercedes-Benz remained largely undamaged.

Racing action starts at Zandvoort at 14:00 h. Jamie Green will be starting from pole position for the seventh round of the season.