High and lows? To go out there and qualify twelfth in the first race at Hockenheim really put the marker down; it showed people I had made a big improvement over the winter months and that I was there to challenge in the DTM. Obviously the lowest point came just 24 hours later with the massive accident at the start of the race. That really put a dent in our year – it’s never good to start the season with a bad race, especially when your car gets totalled in the crash and can’t be used again. You have to start from scratch and we had to try and build everything back up from that and put our campaign back together again.
We did have some other great moments in qualifying too – like at the Norisring and Nürburgring – and some great races like the Lausitzring, where we battled hard and should have finished fifth but didn’t because of the whole fiasco with the safety cars. For me there have definitely been positives to take from the year, and I’m still going to be very busy over the winter now too with promotional and PR work for Mercedes-Benz, training camps and Christmas parties…
Looking to 2008, I hope there are going to be some changes to the championship in terms of strategy concerning when people can make pit-stops, to give all the cars a bit of a fairer chance. People shouldn't be able to have great races purely through strategy, or be hampered by their strategy.
I’ve certainly learned a lot in 2007, and I know what I have to improve over the winter-time for next year. One thing I learned from this year is that I am capable of achieving things in the DTM, and there’s no way I’m going to quit or leave the championship until I’ve shown people what I’m really capable of. I said throughout the whole season my aim was to score points – ok, it didn’t happen in the end, but I know we got very close sometimes and had certain things gone differently we would have finished in the points.
![Susie Stoddart - TV-Spielfilm AMG Mercedes [pic credit: DTM Media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/323722.jpg)
