Audi’s Dieter Gass unconcerned by difference between teams

Audi’s head of DTM, Dieter Gass, has downplayed the time difference between the brand’s four teams.

Mike Rockenfeller fared the best of the Ingolstadt cars in qualifying and missed out on pole position by a mere 0.035 seconds in his Phoenix run RS5. Three other Audis also made the top-1o, with Timo Scheider’s Abt prepared car finishing the best of the rest in sixth. Team Rosberg’s Edoardo Mortara and the sister Phoenix car of Miguel Molina ended qualifying in ninth and tenth respectively.

However, the Abt Sportsline prepared cars of Mattias Ekstrom and Jamie Green had a difficult session and were 13th and 18th, with Adrien Tambay finishing between them in 16th. Stablemate Filipe Albuquerque was even further back, one place behind the Brit in 19th.

When Gass was asked by TouringCarTimes whether the time difference was of any concern to Audi, the former Formula 1 engineer dismissed the suggestions and attributed the nature of the track, as well as some set up optimisation, to the difference in the performance of the cars.

“When you’re at Brands on the short circuit, everything is about 100ths and 1000ths of a second, so the gap isn’t so big.

“I don’t think there’s any particular reason for that and obviously we have a pretty transparent information share, so we’ll follow this up on the set ups as they were not very different [between the cars].

“Maybe it was a little bit about getting the absolute max out of the car at the right time at the right moment.

“As we said, very small differences here make quite big gaps on the grid.”

Gass was also quick to praise Miguel Molina’s performance, and suggested that without a slight mistake on his Q3 hot lap, he would have been able to join Rockenfeller in the pole position shoot-out.

“I think it’s the third time in a row that Rocky [Rockenfeller] has been the quickest Audi here, so it [his performance] could have been expected, but it’s a shame for Miguel who also had a very strong session.

“Maybe he had a slight mistake on his fastest lap, so he missed out on Q4, but I think qualifying wasn’t so bad after all.”