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

A great day for Audi in the DTM: At the Lausitzring, the brand with the four rings celebrated a commanding one-two-three-four victory on Saturday evening and remains unbeaten in the 2015 DTM. Jamie Green in the Hoffmann Group Audi RS 5 DTM of Audi Sport Team Rosberg recaptured the lead of the standings on scoring his second success of the season. Audi Sport Team Abt Sportsline in positions two, three and four completed Audi’s triumph.

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.

You don’t get to see a one-two-three-four re­sult in the DTM every day,

Di­eter Gass

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).

Audi