Zandvoort remains a dangerous patch for pit stops in the DTM: After a Grasser mechanic was seriously injured in an incident last year, another dramatic incident in the pit lane caused a sensation on Saturday – and again Luca Engstler was involuntarily right in the middle of it.
“I only found out about it after the race and immediately apologized to the Schubert team,” says the Grasser-Lamborghini driver at Motorsport-Total.com. As in the previous year, no fault is made. “Fortunately, nothing worse happened.”
“I didn’t even notice it, because I fully concentrated on the fact that we didn’t have a unsafe release and looked to the left. I fully hit,” says Engstler. “This is such a situation that can happen in a tight pit lane as here in Zandvoort.”
So there was a new pit stop incident
The trigger of the new incident was the pit stop chaos in round twelve. Due to the drying route – most of the pilots had started on rain tires – slicks in the first third of the racing became a better choice. Nevertheless, many drivers waited to the pit stop window to save themselves an additional stop.
The consequence: With the opening of the pit stop window, there was a lot of operation, nine vehicles came to change tires at the same time, led by Engstler, who was in third place at that time. But when the Lamborghini driver is stopped, not everything went smoothly.
According to team boss Gottfried Grasser, problems with the impact wrench cost “around two or three seconds”. When his pilot returned, Rene Rast’s BMW was already standing at the neighboring boxing site, because the Schubert crew was currently getting off.
Despite a full steering impact, Engstler touched when driving out a BMW tire lying there, which was catapulted away and brought down a mechanic of the Schubert team. “Thank goodness to nobody is human,” said team boss Torsten Schubert at Motorsport-Total.com.
Schubert gives the all -clear: only “a blue spot”
“There is already a blue spot, but everything else seems to be okay,” reports Schubert on Saturday evening. “It was a stupid coincidence. It is damn tight in the pit lane. Luca has already apologized, called me. I not blame him at all.”
From the point of view of the Grasser team, the incident was also an unfortunate interaction of various factors. “I can’t give any guilt a guilt, not Luca,” says team boss Gottfried Grasser to Motorsport-Total.com. “The angle was actually not extendable where the tire was located.”
“He took the tire with him and the bad thing was that the mechanic was behind it. That shouldn’t happen.” The team boss explicitly protects his driver: “We saw on the data that the steering wheel was on a stop.”
In addition, Engstler could not even know that there is still a tire from the BMW team in front of his car. When the Lamborghini pilot had recently hit his box, neither the BMW from Rast nor its tire were already there.
No punishment for Engstler, Grasser or Schubert
Should the Grasser team have been waiting for the release instead? “You can’t wait. Nobody would wait in the field until the front is ready with the stop,” adds Grasser, and even refers to a possible complicity of the competition: “If the tire is further ahead, it doesn’t happen.”
Would the incident have been prevented if the tire had been stored on the BMW or further towards the vehicle front? “The tire is stored whether it was ten centimeters too far out or not, I can’t say,” said Schubert.
“You can only put the tire next to the car. And here it is so tight, we hang so close to each other. The pit lane is just too tight for 24 cars in the DTM,” says the experienced BMW team boss, who does not reproach his team.
The race management ultimately also refrained from consequences: an investigation against the Grasser team because of the “unsafe release” remained without consequences because the commissioners came to the conclusion that “the situation was caused by a chain reaction in combination with the narrow pit lane.”