Spengler wins race and title at Hockenheim

Bruno Spengler won a nail-biting season finale at Hockenheim, clinching his maiden title in BMW’s comeback year. The Canadian fought against his title rival Gary Paffett for the whole race and eventually finished in front of the Brit. Pole sitter Augusto Farfus completed the podium for BMW.

At the start Farfus had a perfect getaway, while Paffett struggled and slipped down to fourth, leaving the way for Spengler, Joey Hand and Mattias Ekström.

The Swede made contact at the hairpin with the American and Paffett took advantage of it by going up to third. Just a few corners later Spengler took the lead from Farfus and never left it again.

Drama was about to happen at the first stop however. Paffett was close to Farfus and the pair stopped during the same lap. Leaving the pit lane the two were side by side and the Brit eventually passed the Brazilian, an episode for which he was under investigation, which however led to no penalty. On the same lap Ekström retired due to a loose wheel.

On lap 22 David Coulthard and Timo Scheider made contact; The Scot spun and later retired his Mercedes in the pitlane, ending his career in the garage. Scheider was later awarded a drive-through for the incident. Five laps later Miguel Molina hit the wall at Sachs.

By that time, as the race progressed, Paffett had made up some of the gap to Spengler and after the second stop he started pushing really hard, clocking several back-to-back fastest laps, putting Spengler under a huge pressure and even looking as though he was able to at least attack the BMW. As the gap was around one second, though, Paffett appeared to have used up his tyres and was not able to get near enough to try an overtake on the Canadian.

Spengler drove faultlessly and even increased the gap on his rival, bringing it up to two seconds by the end of the race, when fireworks welcomed the newly crowned DTM champion. Paffett finished both the race and the championship in second, while Farfus took his third DTM podium in third position.

Jamie Green, who went into Hockenheim with an outside chance to win the title, came home fourth ahead of Dirk Werner, while Edoardo Mortara managed to fend off the attacks of Andy Priaulx. Joey Hand, Ralf Schumacher and Christian Vietoris completed the points-zone.

BMW Team Schnitzer also won the Teams’ title, while BMW also clinched the Manufacturers Championship by jumping up from third straight to first, courtesy of the 60 points collected this weekend compared to the 33 taken by Mercedes and just 8 points in Audi’s bag.