Meanwhile Katherine Legge will start from fifth, after Maro Engel, Jamie Green and Ralf Schumacher had their times from Q3 disallowed as they exceeded the maximum number of allowed laps.

Legge, who was the fastest driver in a year-old car as a result, was delighted with the place, which incidentally is the best achieved by a woman in the history of the new DTM.

"That was tremendous!" said Katherine. "Everything went according to plan and the team did a good job. I feel that we really deserve this position.

"Qualifying 3 in particular was very interesting. Unfortunately, I had to go to the pits when the track was getting faster and faster but I had already completed the maximum permissible eight laps. The result is okay. Now, I'm looking forward to a good race."

Further down the order, Tom Kristensen and Paul di Resta rounded out the top ten, although the latter was later demoted to 15th due to an infringement of parc fermé regulations.

Of the rest, Johannes Seidlitz will miss the race after the Kolles Futurecom-TME team withdrew its car, while Markus Winkelhock is also doubtful.

Winkelhock heavily damaged his Audi in a bizarre incident in free practice when he hit a manhole cover that had come loose on the start-finish straight. He subsequently had to sit out qualifying and his team now faces a race against time to repair it in time for the warm-up on Sunday morning.

"I'm happy about first and second place for Audi. Unfortunately, my day was over as early as in free practice," Winkelhock noted.

"I drove across a manhole cover that had been lifted by a preceding car at full speed. There was an awful impact and I didn't know at first what was going on.

"I was lucky, though. But now my guys have to do a job within one day that normally takes four: to prepare the car all the way from scratch again. They'll give everything so that I'll be able to start to the race."