DTM in the city: excitement in the Audi camp
- Jamie Green and Mattias Ekström great Norisring fans
- Leader of the standings Green: “Walls do not forgive any mistake”
- Runner-up Ekström: “You can’t drive like you would on a Playstation”
The Audi drivers will have to tackle their ‘home round’ at the Norisring next weekend with plenty of additional weight on board of their Audi RS 5 DTM cars due to their successes in the first races of the 2015 season. Still, leader of the standings Jamie Green and runner-up Mattias Ekström are looking forward to the DTM’s only city street race.
“I think our colleagues (of Mercedes-Benz) from Stuttgart will be a hard nut to crack,” Ekström said on Wednesday at an Audi telephone press conference. “They’ve got a car that fits the track well. And they know exactly how they have to set it up there. But if we get our RS 5 DTM to fit to a T, then we’ll put them under pressure. They’re not going to beat us by hitting just half the bull’s eye.”
Ekström’s brand colleague Jamie Green, who has won three of the four DTM races in the 2015 season so far, has a similar view of the situation. “I’m not sure yet what’s going to be possible this weekend,” says the Briton. “With the high additional weights, the Norisring will be a great challenge for us. But we’re not admitting defeat beforehand in any way. The Audi RS 5 DTM just perfectly fits my natural driving style this year.”
Green and Ekström are great fans of the Nuremberg city street circuit. “Mistakes are no longer punished on most race tracks today,” says Green. “The Norisring has only four corners, but across the race distance they do amount to a large number of turns in which you have to drive closely past the walls – and they don’t forgive any mistake.” Ekström: “On the Norisring, you can’t drive like you would in a parking lot or on the Playstation. The Norisring is one of the classic tracks that I find a lot more interesting than the modern ones.”