DTM still has a long way to go to survive

Who is Rob Veltman?
Rob Veltman, founder of TouringCarNews, has been reporting on Touring Car racing for almost a decade. Rob was born on November 23rd, 1981 and lives in Arnhem, The Netherlands. Before his time at TouringCarNews he wrote for several Motorsport related websites. At the end of 2005 TouringCarNews merged with TouringCarTimes, the start of Veltman’s joined head editorship at TcT.

If WTCC is in the process of dieing, the DTM has already putrefied.

It has been a suprise to me that the S2000 regulations have had such an explosive amount of critisism lately. I can understand there is critisism on the regulations, because they are strange and manipulative. But I hadn’t expected it to be this much in a time the critisism on DTM had his highest point.

The rumours that have been brought into the world about having some large changes in the technical DTM regulations in 2009 seem to have turned things completely around. Suddenly a lot of people are saying these changes are going to make DTM the best and strongest championship around, maybe even the best ever.

With the information that is out now, I don’t believe this will happen. I feel the DTM has to conduct a lot more structural changes. One of the reasons for this is that the DTM wants to look like Formula 1 far too much. They started doing this with changing the two sprint races into one short race and one long race, soon to be changed again into just one long race. Introducing pitstops into the races followed shortly.

After that the Formula 1 pointscoring system was carried through into the championship and soon even ex-F1-drivers were brought into the races, mainly because they had been in Formula 1 and that was good from a marketing point of view.

The worst thing DTM did is was starting to call itself “Formula 1 with a hard top”. Sure, these are just small futilities, but it caused DTM to loose it’s own identity. And exactly this own identity was what made the old DTM so unique. DTM is made into “just a marketing tool” and is not about the racing itself at all anymore.

The biggest part of this problem lies in the foundations of the DTM championship. The DTM is a battle between Mercedes and Audi. However, it should be a fight between Abt, HWA, Rosberg, Mücke Motorsport, Persson Motorsport and the other teams. Thats the only way to have a fair and open championship, without having the manufacturers priorities setting first. The Australian V8 SuperCars championship is a good example of how this works. It would make it much more interesting for other manufacturers to enter the series. It’s a shame DTM is so expensive that a private team can’t develop it’s own car, because that would really benefit the championship.

But unfortunately I don’t think this will ever happen. However, I do believe DTM has to make a lot more extreme changes to both the technical as the sportive regulations. That a championship can die on it’s highest point has been proven by the DTM in 1995 and 1996. S2000 isn’t perfect, in fact S2000 regulations are strange, but it’s still stronger than DTM is now.