Tough going for WINWARD Racing
Lucas Auer also scores points in the Sunday race of the DTM weekend at the Norisring. David Schumacher retires early again.
The Norisring once again lived up to its reputation as the “Monaco of Franconia”. Over the weekend, 102,000 spectators saw two exciting races on the street circuit beside Nuremberg’s Dutzendteich lake, which according to a new measurement is exactly 2.16 kilometres long. For Mercedes-AMG Team WINWARD, however, the second race day was less successful than hoped. After fourth on Saturday, Lucas Auer (28, Kufstein) had to settle for eleventh the following day in the Knaus Mercedes-AMG GT3. Team-mate David Schumacher (21, Salzburg) had to park the Ravenol sister car in the pits after a collision before half-distance.
That Sunday in the Franconian city threatened to be difficult was not only down to the murderous heat outside and inside the cars. Once again it was qualifying that proved complicated for the German-Texan team. Grid positions 16 (Auer) and 21 (Schumacher) were anything but a promising starting point in the extremely close field of the 2023 DTM.
But once again the WINWARD crew did not bury their heads in the sand – quite the opposite. After a super start, Luggi Auer came back from the turbulent opening lap in tenth and, with strong race pace, fought for the top 10 from then on. Unfortunately, despite once again the fastest mandatory pit stop of the field (6.0 seconds), the Austrian lost one more position and finished the one-hour race in eleventh.
“The race itself was very good,” said Auer. “The start worked perfectly, the stop was perfect once again, and the race pace was fine too. Our problem is still qualifying. The best race pace doesn’t help you if you start from back there. If we start further up, we’ll finish further up – it’s that simple.”
Team-mate David Schumacher was thoroughly fed up after his shortened outing: “After the start I lost a few places in the scramble like yesterday and struggled to find a good rhythm. We had changed the set-up significantly after the botched qualifying and made progress in the race too. Unfortunately then came the collision, which I have to take the blame for. I braked as always, but got deep into the ABS range, so the car started to float a bit. I tried to avoid the Audi, but unfortunately in vain.”
Team principal Christian Hohenadel praised his team on the one hand, but also held them to account: “The guys have achieved great things in recent weeks and months. And today they were the fastest again at Luggi’s stop. I take my hat off to that. On the other hand, we all have to work on getting our qualifying performance under control. We now know how tricky it is to get the sensitive Pirelli tyre, which may not be pre-heated in the DTM, into the optimum window. That’s the key to success, and that’s where we must and will start.”
The fourth race weekend of the 2023 DTM season takes place from 4 to 6 August at the Nürburgring – a real home race for the WINWARD squad based only around 100 kilometres away in Altendiez. One week earlier, the same venue hosts the fourth round of the Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup powered by AWS. At the three-hour race in the Eifel, WWR again fields two Mercedes-AMG GT3 for the driver trios Marius Zug/Miklas Born/David Schumacher and Philip Ellis/Indy Dontje/Russell Ward.