Conversion to Rene Rast at the DTM weekend at the Norisring: This time the Schubert BMW driver is not supervised by its long-time success racing engineer Florian Rinkes, who also acts as a team manager and as chief engineer at the BMW team. “I can’t take part in the route because of a health problem,” says Rinkes in an interview with “Motorsport-Total.com”.
However, he was on the way of improvement and plan to be back on site at the Nürburgring in August. Rinkes, who was already working as a racing engineer with Rast at the Rosberg team and led him to all three titles and has also been specifying the direction in the technology area at Schubert since 2023, is replaced by Markus Kuhl at the classic Nuremberg.
Kuhl has been a performance engineer at the Schubert team since the beginning of the season and even has Class 1 experience with the former DTM prototypes from the then Audi works team Phoenix.
At the troop based at the Nürburgring, Kuhl worked in the DTM project from 2018 to 2021 and on the GT3 missions on the Nordschleife in a supporting role. He mostly acted as a racing engineer. Above all, he was one of the architects of the Grasser success a week ago at the 24-hour race of Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium.
Because the Austrian Lamborghini team had hired the engineer for the long-distance classic as strategists, which was obviously profitable, because the Grasser team noticed in the 24 hours with a single wrong decision and was allowed to cheer in the end.
“Every call was right,” said team boss Gottfried Grasser in an interview with “Motorsport-Total.com” about the success with the Trio Mirko Bortolotti, Jordan Pepper and Luca Engstler.
What effects does that have a lack of?
“He is a great guy. We said that we needed a peace pole. He sat down, and we felt that it just fits with him,” Grasser Kuhl sprinkles after the spa triumph roses.
It will be interesting to see whether the change at RAST will now have an impact in the DTM in any form. The 38-year-old Mindener last triumphed at the Sunday race in Zandvoort and had won the Norisring in the past two years.
It was a rast himself who played a leading role at the beginning of 2023 to switch from Florian Rinkes to the BMW team Schubert after team manager and racing engineer Marcel Schmidt left the team and needed a replacement.
With Kuhl, Rast, who is third in the championship, is third in the championship and is also allowed to calculate good chances in the title race, now an experienced man at his side despite Rinkes’s failure.