Audi celebrates one-two-three-four win at Lausitzring

Three races, the best grid po­si­tion three times and three wins: Au­di’s tally in the 2015 DTM re­mains im­pec­ca­ble. The foun­da­tion for the great suc­cess at the Lausitzring was pre­vi­ously laid by the Audi Sport squad in Sat­ur­day’s qual­i­fy­ing. Miguel Molina (Teufel Audi RS 5 DTM), Jamie Green (Hoff­mann Group Audi RS 5 DTM), Edoardo Mor­tara (Cas­trol EDGE Audi RS 5 DTM) and Mat­tias Ek­ström (Red Bull Audi RS 5 DTM) se­cured the top four grid po­si­tions for Audi.

A per­fect start fol­lowed in which the Audi quar­tet was able to parry off the at­tacks by the com­pe­ti­tion from BMW and Mer­cedes-Benz and de­fended po­si­tions one to four ini­tially in the same or­der. Up to the 25th of the 32 laps Miguel Molina de­fended the lead be­fore hav­ing to give in to the pres­sure by his brand col­leagues Jamie Green, Edoardo Mor­tara and Mat­tias Ek­ström, which caused him to drop to fourth place.

The sec­ond vic­tory of the sea­son by Jamie Green was par­tic­u­larly im­pres­sive from two per­spec­tives. The Briton is not in the best of health and can hardly talk, which made ra­dio com­mu­ni­ca­tions with his team more dif­fi­cult. In ad­di­tion, the drag re­duc­tion sys­tem (DRS) that al­lows the rear wing an­gle to be flat­tened did not work in his case. “That’s why it was hard to over­take Miguel (Molina),” said the Briton fol­low­ing his tri­umph. “But my car was sim­ply per­fect for my dri­ving style. With two suc­cesses in the first three races, this is a dream start to the new sea­son for me.”

Three Audi dri­vers – Jamie Green (50 points), Edoardo Mor­tara (48) and Mat­tias Ek­ström (40) – con­tinue to rank at the top of the stand­ings. Af­ter a qual­i­fy­ing ses­sion that was not op­ti­mal, the two dri­vers from Audi Sport Team Phoenix fin­ished in the points as well. Timo Schei­der (AUTO TEST Audi RS 5 DTM) bat­tled his way for­ward from grid po­si­tion ten to eighth place and Mike Rock­en­feller (Scha­ef­fler Audi RS 5 DTM) from 14th on the grid to po­si­tion nine.

Only Adrien Tam­bay (Play­boy Audi RS 5 DTM/​po­si­tion 16) and Nico Müller (Audi Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices Audi RS 5 DTM/​po­si­tion 20) re­mained with­out points. Tam­bay had to start the race from the last po­si­tion on the grid and Müller al­ready dam­aged his car on lap one and lost fur­ther ground in a col­li­sion.

“You don’t get to see a one-two-three-four re­sult in the DTM every day,” said Di­eter Gass, Head of DTM at Audi Sport. “That’s why our joy is even greater – es­pe­cially at the Lausitzring, a track that we of­ten had some dif­fi­culty with in the past. This shows that we re­ally did good work in win­ter. But we’re keep­ing our feet planted firmly on the ground. Al­though things seemed to be pretty easy for us at the front to­day the gap to the com­pe­ti­tion is­n’t very large. The tides can turn very quickly in the DTM be­cause the field is so close. Things can look com­pletely dif­fer­ent to­mor­row.”

The fourth race of the 2015 DTM is sched­uled for Sun­day at 14.23, lo­cal time (live cov­er­age on ‘Das Er­ste’ start­ing at 14.00).