A difficult race in the Catalan capital left Sweden’s Mattias Ekström 12 points adrift of DTM championship leader Timo Scheider with only two rounds of the 2009 championship remaining.
The race to the first corner is crucial at the Circuit de Catalunya and rarely has it been proven so emphatically. Starting fifth, Scheider took the lead at the first corner by driving all the way around the outside and avoiding the traditional mélèe. He never looked back and cruised to his second victory of the season. Ekström, driving the Red Bull Audi A4 DTM, was left behind, locked in a battle for fourth with Gary Paffett. Ekström made an all-or-nothing overtaking move two laps from home but failed to get around the outside at the end of the back-straight, lost track position and was picked off by the hard-charging Bruno Spengler.
“I think I would say the race in Barcelona was one of those days where everything went wrong,” says a reflective Ekström, “Actually things started going wrong in qualifying. We weren’t able to make [the car] work. We just have to accept what happened and go ahead from there and improve for the next race.”
If Ekström hopes to add to his two DTM titles, then the challenge for the last two rounds – at Dijon and Hockenheim – is straightforward: he needs victories. It is, he argues, an approach that will require him to do nothing different to his normal routine. “Yeah, we have to win the races now, but we’re always trying to win so there’s no real change. The most important thing is to keep on pushing. Do that and things can always happen for sure. I’ve had some tough luck, and there’s no reason to think that Timo won’t have the same in the last two races. So my job is to continue pushing and see if it will be enough or not.”
"Things haven’t gone exactly as I would wish'
The Swede has not recorded a winless DTM season since 2003, but after a promising start that included two pole positions and three fastest laps, has fell away in the last two rounds. He insists that nothing is specifically wrong, but also acknowledges that the car isn’t quite as competitive as it felt at the start of the season. “At the beginning I was pretty confident with the way it was handling, but we’ve had some races recently when things haven’t gone exactly as I would wish. But DTM is like that, and you have to be on the limit and concentrating really hard even when it’s difficult to perform well.”
If Ekström does kick-start a great escape in France, he’ll not be the first Swede to taste the champagne at Dijon. 25 years ago, the great Ronnie Peterson won the French F1 Grand Prix at the famous venue.
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