Mattias maintained his excellent form in the Red Bull Audi A4 DTM with victory from pole position at Valencia’s Circuit Ricardo Tormo in the penultimate round of the 2011 Championship.
I don’t think I’d be surprising anybody if I said things were going pretty well for us in DTM at the moment. Winning in Valencia stretched our good run of form to three wins and a second place in the last four races. I heard afterwards someone saying that we’re making it look easy: well, it’s never easy to win a race in DTM and the second half of this season has been no exception to that rule. The Audi A4 DTM is a very good car, no mistake about that, but the fact we’ve had good races in the last couple of months is down to the hard work the Abt team and Audi Sport have been putting in all season.
At the start of the year obviously things weren’t working out. When that happens you have to keep concentrating on doing the right things, making changes that need to be made, and working in the knowledge that eventually the results will come.
I think maybe there’s a temptation to assume we made a big breakthrough and suddenly everything becomes easy but it doesn’t work like that: we didn’t get a fantastic race-winning car because one component had changed: no one was waving a magic wand in our garage. What’s really happened is a lot of fine-tuning. The team developed the car with the little bits and pieces that make a difference, gradually building them up into a really strong package.
'I've never had a sequence this good in DTM before... now we have one more opportunity'
Once you have that, what you need is a clean weekend. In Valencia we had this. Nothing exceptional, just a good, clean weekend with plenty of running, no technical problems and a chance to put in the laps we needed. We had good performance from the start to the end of the event and we're pretty confident that, if qualifying went well and we were up at the front, then we had a car that could win the race. Then it’s just a matter of driving hard and not doing anything stupid. What’s that old saying?... to finish first, first you have to finish.
In the first half of the year we had some clean weekends but maybe didn’t have the package right, or when we did have a competitive car, we didn’t have a clean weekend. I don’t think I’m driving any different to how I was in May, June and July but the results are coming because all those bits and pieces are in the right place and we’re confident as a team that we can put the times down out on the track. I’ve never had a sequence this good in DTM before, and we have one more opportunity to top it up at Hockenheim.
It’s going to be interesting going back to race on the circuit where the DTM season had its second race in May, as we’ll be able to properly gauge the development that we’ve made over the course of the year. Of course it’s always nice to go there anyway because we’ll have a big crowd and because it’s a good racing circuit. I’m looking forward to it and feel that we’ve got one more really good race in us – but I’m also looking forward to a bit of time off afterwards to recover and take stock before launching into the winter training programme.
I think there'll be a bit of an ‘end-of-term’ feeling to the place because, of course, Martin Tomczyk won the Drivers’ Championship in Valencia. Congratulations to him and Audi Sport Team Phoenix. Why has an older-specification car been able to win the Championship so convincingly this season? Well, they carry 25kg less than we do, and with the tyres having a little less grip this year that suddenly becomes quite important – but the real reason is that Martin is a good driver who has driven very well and his team are good people. In the end that’s definitely what matters most.
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