In her third exclusive column for Crash.net, Mercedes’ DTM sophomore Susie Stoddart talks about the best race result of her 2007 campaign to-date, and looks forward to opening her point-scoring account for the year before the season is out…
The DTM’s second ‘outside’ race in 2007 was at Mugello in Italy. It was a real challenge for all the drivers because it was so hot, both inside and out of the car. It was quite a difficult weekend in that I had never been to the track before, Mercedes-Benz had never tested there and Audi had done a test pre-season, so we were really up against it. Qualifying wasn’t that great, but we managed to turn it around in the race and I had a strong run to tenth; after the re-start I had Bernd Schneider behind me and I managed to keep him there, so it ended up being a positive result for me.
Zandvoort two weeks later was a difficult weekend. We certainly had the pace in qualifying; I was on my fastest lap when the red flags came out for an incident, which meant I never clocked my quickest lap time. In that sense it was very disappointing for all of us. We had put a lot of work in over the weekend and the lap time was there, we just didn’t get it recorded on the board because the red flags came out.
The race was strong. I was on a very different strategy to everybody else, but then unfortunately my second pit-stop was over a minute long so after that I was never going to get a good result. I was still quite happy with my performance though; I was making progress and on the pace, so it wasn’t all bad.
Following Zandvoort the DTM took its mid-season summer break. I went on holiday for a week, re-charged my batteries and got back into training and going to all my German lessons. I’m pleased to say my German is getting better every day!
![Susie Stoddart - TV-Spielfilm AMG Mercedes [pic credit: DTM Media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/323722.jpg)
