Saturday’s rainy race was dominated by Mercedes. However, BMW stole the spotlight by recording a 1-2-3-4 on Sunday in Moscow. It was BMW’s Marco Wittmann who led the pack with a dominant win. He impressed in qualifying, landed the Red Bull BMW M4 DTM on pole position and then successfully got a win for the 50th race of his DTM career. There are only good words from the rest of the drivers there, including Audi Driver Edoardo Mortara.
Wittman was on top of the standings, followed by Tom Blomqvist (GB, Ice-Watch BMW M4 DTM), Bruno Spengler (CA, BMW Bank M4 DTM) and Augusto Farfus (BR, Shell BMW M4 DTM). They finished second, third and fourth respectively.
Audi driver Edoardo Mortara unfortunately had a disastrous qualifying for and finished sixth in Sunday’s race. In an interview with Motorsport.com, he was asked about the qualifying trouble for Audi.
Mortara said: “To be honest with you, you had BMW being like four tenths faster than Mercedes. We were not actually far from Mercedes, but BMW was too strong in qualifying.
“It was just a joke. When it’s like this, it becomes difficult to go racing.
“Today the difference was too big. Normally in the DTM we’re not used to that much of a difference. I don’t know what they did – I always have the impression that they’re a little bit playing with us and probably today they pushed in full, and we had a true [picture], we saw what they can do.â€
“If they continue like this… [there] should be no championship,†added the Italian, who is currently the fourth in the DTM standings, 26 points behind Wittmann.
“We’re still going to fight and we’re still going to try to make their lives hard – but we were one second off them in qualifying and we were pushing full. It’s difficult for sure.â€
Before the season began, it was stated that the M4’s base weight was set at 1112.5kg compared to Mercedes-AMG C63’s and Audi RS5’s 1120kg. BMW was also allowed to make its rear wing 5cm wider.