Schneider couldn’t breathe too easily however as less than two seconds covered all three drivers and although the race was for sixth place on the track, all eyes were focused on it.
On lap 23 Schneider lost a small amount of ground coming out of the third turn and Scheider was quickly crawling all over the rear end of the #4 Mercedes heading into the tight Hockenheim hairpin. One lap later it was Albers’ turn to attack, his slight nudge sending Scheider into a lazy spin and the crowd wild as the two title combatants finally locked horns.
With Mercedes’ Norbert Haug and Co. watching captively on pit wall, Albers spent lap 25 sizing up his teammate, occasionally darting out from Schneider’s slipstream as if to try and distract the former Zakspeed and Arrows
Formula One driver and factory Mercedes GT star.
However disaster struck on the very next lap for as the two began braking for the hairpin, Albers’ left rear tyre went flat in similar fashion to Schneider’s and the former
FIA International Formula 3000 pilot was just about able to haul his car onto the outside rumble strip and into the run-off area without collecting his oblivious teammate. After more than half a lap running at reduced pace on his way back to the pits, Albers’ third stop dropped him to 17th and brought the title chase to a disappointing end.
With Schneider now staring a third DTM title in four years straight in the face, attention turned to the battle for the lead, a highly dramatic affair from the word go as polesitter Mattias Ekstrom fought to hold off Jean Alesi in the opening laps only to watch the mercurial French Sicilian grab the point on lap eight.
Barring the pit-stop shuffles, which yet again allowed Gary Paffett to lead the field for a short time, Alesi maintained top spot throughout, with Ekstrom sitting a couple of seconds in arrears and a relatively safe distance ahead of the intense battle for third initially between Dumbreck and Schneider but later disputed by Dumbreck, Marcel Fassler and Laurent Aiello.
