Gary Paffett hits out at tyre regulations change

Mercedes AMG driver Gary Paffett has been critical of changes introducing a minimum tyre pressure in the DTM ahead of this weekend’s meeting at the Nurburgring.

Paffet was speaking after the opening race, with the Briton saying he believed that the reason for the change wasn’t simply one made for safety reasons and was a source of frustration for the Mercedes teams.

“Obviously everybody has to run the same pressure,” he told TouringCarTimes, “but we designed the car to work with the optimum tyre pressures throughout the winter and throughout the whole season. To be now forced to run something which is very sub-optimal and suits other cars better than ours, means that we have to do something to change the philosophy with which you run the car, which is very frustrating.”

Paffett qualified in second place on the grid, but eventually finished third, unable to fight back at BMW’s Bruno Spengler and under fire from BMW’s Timo Glock.

The situation was frustrating for the Briton who, together with team-mate at HWA Paul di Resta, had dominated the season so far.

“Qualifying pace for us was really good,” he said. “The car is the same pace it has been all the weekends. But the race pace with the tyre pressure is a lot worse and other cars work better with this tyre pressure, so it’s frustrating to be force to run like this. Personally I don’t understand why it has been done like this.”

Both Hankook and DTM have referred to safety issues as the primary reason for the change, but Paffett thinks very differently and the Briton was adamant to put his point across.

“It’s certainly not for safety reasons, and it’s not to level the field, because it’s not achieving that,” he said. “Levelling the playing field is giving people the equipment to compete. This is just an attempt to change the results. Obviously there are minimum safety requirements, but we have always been above the minimum required by Hankook.”

Asked if he saw a danger for his and Mercedes-AMG’s challenge for this year’s title, Paffett was unsure that the Stuttgart-based manufacturer has it all clearly cut for the remainder of the season.

“You never know, they are a long way behind, but there are still 125 points plus qualifying and today I could quite easily have finished fifth behind Marco (Wittmann, BMW) and would have lost a lot more points,” he said. “I lost 11 points to René today, ok, he’s 72 behind, but if he does that every weekend he’s going to get close. We will see, but we will have to keep trying and do our best with the regulations we have every weekend.”

Paffett also reflected on his strategy today, citing the uncertainty under the new rule as one of the reasons for his lack of race pace.

“The thing is that, with the pressures the way they are, we have to be very careful with the car because we know there is going to be a big drop-off, so we have to manage,” he said. “But you never know, maybe we were just over managing. Maybe I could have pushed harder, but I wasn’t prepared to chase after Bruno. Based where we finished and that we were all doing different things, maybe we were all doing it wrong.”

Mercedes-AMG boss in the DTM Ulrich Fritz believes the team will have to sit in front of a lot of data tonight to rectify the situation.

“I think we had a really good package before this adjustment of the regulations which we understood quite well,” he said. “It’s a bit disappointing for us to see what this rule change is doing for us but we have to see what we can learn from it but it’s not great what it’s doing for us in the championship.”

Despite the setback, Paffett’s third place, together with di Resta not scoring, means that the Briton has retaken the championship lead with 194 points, eight ahead of the Scot. Fellow Mercedes-AMG driver Edoardo Mortara is third, 56 points behind, with BMW’s Marco Wittmann the best of the rest in fourth with 122 points, one ahead of Audi’s René Rast.

In the manufacturers’ championship Mercedes-AMG still leads comfortably with 769 points, 284 ahead of BMW Motorsport and 433 over Audi Sport.