Engel celebrates: a podium for his anniversary
Maro Engel brings Mercedes-AMG Team WINWARD second place in the DTM Sunday race at the Norisring. A difficult race day for Lucas Auer.
There is hardly a better way to celebrate such an anniversary! Maro Engel finished his 100th DTM race, the Sunday race at the Norisring, in second place, giving Mercedes-AMG Team WINWARD its third podium of the current DTM season. The 38-year-old Monaco resident, driving his Mercedes-AMG GT3 in the colours of “130 Years of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport” and RAVENOL, moved up to fourth in the DTM standings, just 15 points behind the leader. For team-mate Lucas Auer, on the other hand, a difficult weekend continued. The 29-year-old from Kufstein in Tyrol finished the second race on the 2.16-kilometre street circuit beside Nuremberg’s Dutzendteich lake in a disappointing eleventh place in the “Mamba” entered by Mercedes-AMG Team MANN-FILTER.
Engel had already shown his ambitions in morning qualifying. Second place in his qualifying group meant third on the grid. From the start, the Munich-born driver put pressure on the Lamborghini ahead and, after another strong mandatory pit stop by his WWR crew, squeezed past into second place on lap 28. The two leaders then steadily pulled away from the rest of the field and, after a short safety car phase (carbon parts on the track), finished in that order.
“Standing on the podium at my anniversary race in front of this dream backdrop with 110,000 fans over the whole weekend – it hardly gets better than that,” beamed Maro Engel. “I thank my team, who gave me a perfect race car all weekend. We already showed our potential yesterday, and I’m glad we could deliver today. I gave everything and tried to keep up the pressure to the finish. But Nicki was simply the fastest today, so we can be completely happy with second place. We carefully analysed the difficult weekend at Zandvoort and drew the right conclusions. It’s great to be back!”
For Luggi Auer, the Sunday race did not go to plan either. After a perfect start from eighth straight up to sixth, the Austrian could not keep up his usual strong race pace over the distance and dropped back to eleventh by the chequered flag. “In general we were missing that little something all weekend,” admitted the 2022 DTM runner-up. “In qualifying we didn’t manage to get the full potential out on either day. Today in the race I simply lacked pace. I had big problems with the brakes. We have to look at that closely, because today the gap was just too big.”
WWR team principal Christian Hohenadel’s overall verdict was positive: “We were in good shape here all weekend. I’m very happy for Maro that he could finish his anniversary race on the podium. We have to analyse thoroughly why Luggi didn’t perform as strongly here as we are used to. The good news is certainly that we have made a good step forward in terms of pace. That makes me confident for the second half of the season.”
The DTM now takes a six-week summer break. The fifth race weekend of the 2024 season takes place from 16 to 18 August at the Nürburgring, practically a home race for Mercedes-AMG Team WINWARD, whose European base in Altendiez is only around 100 kilometres from the legendary Eifel circuit.