In the finale at Hockenheim, in front of 135,000 spectators (throughout the weekend), Audi won the two last races of the DTM season and on Sunday repeated last year’s one-two-three victory. On clinching his fourth success this season, the Briton Jamie Green in the Hoffmann Group Audi RS 5 DTM of Audi Sport Team Rosberg secured the runner-up’s spot in the Championship.
18 races, ten victories, 21 podiums, ten fastest race laps and eight pole positions: The Audi RS 5 DTM was the strongest car in the 2015 DTM season. Still, in the end, this tally was only enough for the brand with the four rings to take second, third and fourth place in the drivers’ classification, second place among the manufacturers, and third place in the teams’ classification. Jamie Green was 19 points short of winning the drivers’ title and the margin in the title race of the manufacturers’ classification, with 602 versus 595 points, was even smaller.
“This was a bitter-sweet ending of the season for us,” said Dieter Gass, Head of DTM at Audi Sport. “The fans got to see an impressive performance of the Audi RS 5 DTM and a superb one-two-three win once more. In spite of a difficult starting base, the manufacturers’ title was within our reach today, but we let it slip away. It was aggravating that we incurred two drive-through penalties.”
The first one was imposed on Nico Müller (Audi Financial Services Audi RS 5 DTM) for a pit stop violation (‘unsafe release’). On lap 16, there was a collision between Christian Vietoris (Mercedes) and the two Audi drivers Miguel Molina (Teufel Audi RS 5 DTM) and Adrien Tambay (Playboy Audi RS 5 DTM), which meant the end of the race for Tambay, who had been running in position four in the early stage. “That I was punished for this mystifies me,” Molina said, wondering about the penalty.