Second seasonal pole for Lucas Auer at Saturday qualifying on the Lausitzring, with which the Landgraf Mercedes pilot gets back the DTM lead with Jordan Pepper: The Austrian was in 1: 19,827 in good conditions for 0.033 seconds faster than land-Audi pilot Ricardo Feller, who is back at the top.
With his top time, which Auer drove a whopping seven rounds after leaving the box because of the low temperatures of ten degrees, the Oschersleben winner was 0.110 seconds faster than Jack Aitken from 2023. “It was a top qualifying,” says Auer at Ran.de. “We made some changes yesterday that pulled. And today it was just good.”
For Feller, who has had a hard year with Abbot, the return to the top tastes particularly sweet, especially since he only fixed his DTM project with land engine sport at short notice before the start of the season-and now starts again for the first time with his ADAC-GT Masters car called “Eileen” from 2021.
Feller about “Eileen”: “Want to get car out again and again”
“I wanted to get this car out again and again in recent years because it always worked great,” the Swiss smiles at “ran.de”.
“Now standing in the first series of stars directly at the first qualifying series shows that the car is good, but of course the boys also did a great job.”
For the short -term team, it will now be important to get the tire change properly in the race. The two Winward Mercedes pilots Maro Engel (+0.062) and Jules Gounon (+0.146), which thus confirm the strong Mercedes-AMG performance, are in places three and four.
Rest surprisingly strong: “Don’t feel normal”
For Schubert BMW pilot Rene Rast, who finished fifth with 0.169 seconds, things went really well in view of the BMW difficulties in qualifying. “I think this is my best result since 2023 or something, I don’t know,” says the three-time DTM champion at ran.de. “In any case, does not feel normal for the DTM.”
Since he usually overtakes half the field from behind, he can now “do a lot” in the race, especially since the Lausitzring has a long straight that should be the BMW M4 GT3 EVO. Incidentally, teammate Marco Wittmann landed in seventh place with behind the best Emil Frey Ferrari pilot Aitken (P6, +0.224)-and was 0.250 seconds behind.
The two Manthey Porsche pilots Ayhancan Güven (+0,269) and Thomas Preining (+0.305) rank eight and nine behind Wittmann.
Disappointments for Glock and Lamborghini pilots
There was a disappointment for Timo Glock again: the Dörr McLaren pilot, which gives a DTM comeback this year, came to the 21st place despite its change of vehicle and the positive signs in free training with 0.729 seconds. Teammate Ben Dörr, on the other hand, lost only 0.321 seconds to the poles, whereby the youngster starts from tenth.
For Lamborghini, too, qualifying did not run as desired: Grasser-Pilot Jordan Pepper, who went to the weekend as a DTM leader, was teammate Luca Engstler (+0.356) as a 13th place with Mirko Bortolotti (+0.423) with 0.433 seconds behind the best. Abbot pilot.
The Ford Mustang pilots are still stuck in the back ranks: Despite the encouraging training start, Fabio Scherer (+0,617) and Arjun Maini (+0.705) did not get beyond places 19 and 20, which also shows the narrow intervals.
This time the Saturday race will start at 12:30 p.m.