After what was an exciting qualifying session yesterday afternoon at Hockenheim, Audi Sport’s Edoardo Mortara finally got into Q3 by a whisker, but made it count by taking third on the grid for today’s race.
Initally, the Italian, who drives for Team Abt, didn’t have the best of starts to the day, which he admitted during yesterday’s international post-qualifying press conference: ” Today started like it was a disaster and after free practice, I was worried because I couldn’t get the car to work in the correct way. We were more than one second off and we couldn’t find any solution.”
Drivers this season in the DTM have found the going tougher as the season has progressed, with the overall field being covered by around 1.1 seconds this weekend. The differential between drivers have been up to thousands of a second come the end of each session in qualifying, which has been closer than it was back in May.
Mortara was not initially happy with how the RS5 DTM was initially fairing in his hands, but the “King of Macau” managed to make a turnaround that saw him improve gradually during qualifying: “I was not expecting a good qualifying, to be honest. Normally, we have you have a bad free practice, sometimes it can be quite tricky to do well in qualifying. So today we managed to turn things around and gives you some extra motivation.”
The 27-year-old last took victory back in 2012 at Zandvoort, has already taken two podium finishes this year, securing third place at both Oschersleben and Nurburgring, so he is in a prime position to hopefully end his year on a high, whether he takes to the podium, no matter the step he lands on.
