I turned up for my first DTM test at the Nurburgring, at what was the third race of the season, which was even more pressure as everyone else already had two races in the cars and was pretty daunting. I was in at the deep end, no pre-season testing or anything, and it was amazing. I went out for the first session, and came back in quickest of the old cars, and quicker than my team-mate who had been doing it for a year and a half.
Q:
Then you were into a race environment in a car maybe twice as heavy as you were used to racing, and a very different form of racing, with a level of touching and nudging that you wouldn’t have seen in single-seaters?
GP:
You get very close in single-seaters, but there is no touching. A DTM car is double the weight of an F3 car, but you have over 500bhp - a lot of power - and no traction control, ABS, or anything like that, so it is very on the edge racing.
The cars are very technically sophisticated, almost like a
Formula One car with bodywork, they have big carbon fibre brakes, proper suspension, and carbon fibre bodywork. You can get in one of those cars and go quickly using what you have learned in single-seaters. You have to adapt yourself a bit to get the best out of it for qualifying, and also the racing.
I only finished one out of the first three races I did, and my first actual race I crashed and wrote the front of the car off on the second lap - hitting a pile of tyres that were stacked up at the chicane. It was a very steep learning curve. Driving the car was no problem, but the racing was major step forward compared to anything else I had done.
Every single-seater class you go up it gets more difficult, the races get longer, then you go to something like the DTM and it is completely different, you have to completely change your approach to the races.
Q:
In single-seaters you progress with the same young group of drivers, then in the DTM you are suddenly up against hugely experienced racers like Bernd Schneider and Laurent Aiello, drivers with a lot of experience in saloons?
GP:
This year I didn’t get to race with front runners like Schneider or Albers, but I had a bit of a race with Aiello and Zandvoort. Almost all of the drivers in the series had many years of experience.
