Mattias Ekstrom has strengthened his grip on the DTM title with victory in an action packed race at Zandvoort.
The Audi driver clinched his third win of the season as he led home a second straight one-two finish for the team to extend his lead at the top to 13 points with 20 points left to play for.
Martin Tomcyzk played his part, following Ekstrom home in second, with Christijan Albers completing the podium for Mercedes.
Ekstrom had been leading the race, with his title rivals Albers and Gary Paffett running down the order – Paffett having been hit with a drive through penalty - when a huge accident from the Opel of Peter Dumbreck forced the race to be stopped.
Heading out of the final corner, Dumbreck went straight on into the barrier, the Vectra smashing into the tyre wall before rolling to a standstill on the start/finish straight.
With debris all over the track, race officials had little option but to show the red flag and halt the race.
Despite the violent nature of the accident, and the enormous amount of damage done to the car, the Scottish driver escaped without injury.
“The best news of the day is that Peter Dumbreck is well,” Opel motorsport director Volker Strycek said afterwards. “Peter is already back sitting with his racing engineer looking at the data recordings. The cause of the accident was that Peter was too fast and came a bit off his line. The problem was that the car practically got hooked into the stack of tyres and therefore flipped over several times.
“The crash would certainly have been much more serious had there not have been that tyre stack. It says a lot for the high safety standards of the DTM cars that nothing happened to Peter.”
With less than 75% of the race run at the time of the accident, the race became a ten lap sprint, with the cars lining up on the grid as they had been running two laps before Dumbreck went off track.
