Thirteenth on the grid at the Nürburgring last time out was positive for me. I was ninth in the first qualifying session, and had I been able to carry that pace through into the second session too then I might have been in a slightly better position, but still 13th wasn’t bad. It showed people we are on the pace and that we do have the capability to score points once we get everything right and get the set-up and the feeling there.
The race was fairly uneventful for me. I made a bad start and after that was very quick but unfortunately got held up in traffic. Again I had a very different pit strategy to everybody else, which probably didn’t work quite as well as it should have done. I also received a drive-through penalty towards the end of the race for crossing the white line at the exit of the pit-lane.
On the surface Audi do seem to have the upper hand over Mercedes at the moment, but I think the prime reason for that is because of the weight penalties this year in the DTM. At the Nürburgring it was an Audi one-two-three in qualifying, and less than a tenth of a second covered the top four. Bruno Spengler’s car was 10kg heavier than the Audis, so I think if you were to take the weight into consideration it all evens out quite a lot.
I’m now very much looking forward to the final two rounds, at Barcelona this coming weekend and Hockenheim in October. We’ve got to take the fight to Audi. Both Mattias Ekström and Martin Tomczyk are in a very strong position, but it’s still wide open for Bruno too, so we’ll all be working together to try and help him come away from Barcelona with as many points as possible and make sure we travel to Hockenheim with the championship still to fight for.
![Susie Stoddart - TV-Spielfilm AMG Mercedes [pic credit: DTM Media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/323722.jpg)
