DTM German Touring Car Season Starts Today

Hmmmm. The DTM has never been popular in this country (motorsport isn't popular in this country!) primarily because of the lack of British drivers and… er… lack of interest.

First of all, unlike most other touring series where your racing cars actually look like the road cars, The DTM is your road car pumped with monumental amounts of anabolic steroids. This makes them damn ugly (fugly). I mean trolls look prettier, look:

And I suppose it should be even more boring because there's only 2 manufacturers. Audi and Mercedes. But the engines are beasts: 470BHP V8 brutes and the series contains big names like Mika Häkkinen, Jean Alesi, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Tom Kristensen (of F1 and Le Mans fame). So even when these guys waltz in – they don't just win by default (in fact they'll normally loiter around 7th), the competition is fierce.

So after Gary Paffett won the 2005 championship and has now left, we're left with Jamie Green (pole position this weekend) and rookie Susie Stoddart. Yes finally there are women in a top level racing series who can cut the mustard.

Susie Stoddart has only just graduated from F3 and hopefully will progressively learn well in her rookie season, despite limited time in the cockpit of a DTM C-class. And plus it must be really cool to have Mika Häkkinen as a mentor. Should be a good season. Looking forward to my-main-man-Mika getting to grips and doing well. Mika retired from F1 in 2001 and subsequently became quite fat in his 3 year absence, before contemplating a return, that never materialised because of Button-gate.

Goodluck to all the drivers, but its a real shame they'll never show it on regular TV (only on MotorsTV I think).

FYI Lotte, the other female driver is a Belgian!

Nathaniel Ho : 09 Apr 2006 12:33 |  Tags: Cars Dtm Motorsport Motorsports |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem