Running in one of the old cars meant we were obviously not right at the front of the grid, but I found I could battle with people like Joachim Winklehock who had lots of Touring Car experience. Suddenly you find you are racing against people you have seen on TV in Touring Cars and have loads of experience, and you have to be focussed on what you are doing.
You see Touring Cars on the track, moving each other round, and you think that suddenly I’ve got something I can start touching people with now. You get out there, and I think it was in my third race at the Norisring, I thought I would do a bit of touching and caught Karl Wendlinger quite badly going into a corner, misjudged it a bit, spun him round, we had a crash, and it damaged the front of my car again.
That’s when you start to realise that that where in single-seaters you get close and don’t touch, in Touring Cars you touch - but there is a very fine limit to how much you can touch and where you can do it. It’s very easy to step over that limit and destroy the front of the car. Especially with a DTM car - they are strong cars, but lightweight, if you push something in a direction it is not supposed to go in, it breaks. We have big front splitters that can cope over kerbs and bumps, but give them the wrong sort of knock and they fall off and that is the end of your race.
It’s something difficult to learn at first, but by the time you have done four or five races, especially in the mid-filed where there is so much going on, you get used to it and quickly learn what you can do. Another thing is the amount of room on the right hand side of the car compared to the left takes some getting used to. At places like the street-circuit at the Norisring, you come out of the hairpin with the Armco, you let the car slide out and you feel it bounce of the barrier, and you think ‘that was a bit close this time’.
