Following the disappointment on Saturday, the Audi Sport Team Abt Sportsline came back in the second of the two DTM races at Zandvoort (Netherlands) with a third place for Edoardo Mortara.
At the start to the second race, the Italian in his Castrol EDGE Audi RS 5 DTM dropped from fourth to fifth place but on the last laps gained two positions when the Mercedes-Benz cars in front of him encountered problems with their front tyres. Nico Müller (Playboy Audi RS 5 DTM) and Mattias Ekström (Red Bull Audi RS 5 DTM), thanks to their fresher tyres, were able to make up many places in the final stage and finished Sunday’s race in positions five and seven. With that, they contributed their share to Audi now trailing the front runner in the manufacturers’ classification, BMW, by only ten points and being able to reach for the lead of the standings in Moscow (Russia) on August 20/21.
On Saturday Edoardo Mortara had been in a promising sixth position before the race directors imposed a drive-through penalty on the Italian for an alleged violation of the slow-zone rules. “I did nothing wrong,” said Mortara. “That’s also obvious based on the on-board footage from my car and our data log.” In the evening, the stewards of the meeting admitted discrepancies in the official GPS system on the cars of Edoardo Mortara and Nico Müller.
Edoardo Mortara: “We didn’t score the points at Zandvoort we would have deserved. Due to the penalty on Saturday, we lost eight to ten points that we would have urgently needed in the championship race. I’m now trailing Marco Wittmann by 17 points and will continue to battle. Although the podium on Sunday feels good it doesn’t erase what happened in the first race.”