Maro Engel has won in race 1 of DTM at Zandvoort, taking the lead at the start from second on the grid and never looking back.
The Mercedes-AMG MANN-FILTER team driver finished exactly six seconds ahead of second placed Sheldon van der Linde in the Schubert BMW, with Franck Perera in the SSR Performance Lamborghini third, just over half a second back from the South African.
Engel dominated proceedings in the first race of the weekend at Zandvoort. He retained the lead after starting on pole, with S. van der Linde following Engel through into second and Marco Wittmann in third in the
From there on, Engel pulled away from the two BMWs, pitting with a healthy gap of over three seconds when the pit stop window opened 20 minutes into the 60 minutes + 1 lap race.
He emerged from the pits with an even greater lead, as his late stop, meaning he overcutted his rivals, and grew his lead even further to exactly six seconds, taking a lights-to-flag victory, as well as pole position.
Sheldon van der Linde had a similarly uneventful race, retaining second at the start and fending off challenges to the position through the race.
Perera was one of those challengers. The Frenchman started fourth, alongside Wittmann, and stayed there until the stops. He pitted later than Wittmann, and in common with most others in this race who employed the overcut strategy, he emerged ahead of Wittmann and into third. Wittmann dropped to fifth behind Perera’s teammate Mirko Bortolotti, amd although the German did manage to overtake the Italian for fourth, and put considerable pressure on Perera, he wasn’t able to take the final spot on the podium.
Bortolotti finished fifth after briefly taking that fourth position and then forcibly surrendering it to Wittmann after the stops. The top 5 had a considerable gap of xx to Lucas Auer, who finished sixth for Team Winward Mercedes-AMG. Porsche Manthey EMA’s Thomas Preining finished seventh, with eighth going to Dries Vanthoor and Jusuf Owega.
Luca Stolz and Kelvin van der Linde came home 11th and 12th. K. van der Linde did run as high as fifth in the opening stages, but had to take a penalty lap as a result of being in an inaccurate grid position at the start, dropping him down the order.
The final points paying positions were taken by Ayhancan Guven, Luca Engstler and Ricardo Feller.
Race 2 gets underway tomorrow, Sunday 25th June, at 1:30pm local time.
