ABT Sportsline is familiar with the Huracán GT3 EVO2 from racing on the Nürburgring-Nordschleife. However, the experience gained there can only be transferred to the DTM to a limited extent. This had already become apparent during the DTM debut at Oschersleben.
After a promising day of testing, the team travelled to the Lausitzring in a positive mood. On Friday, however, the two cars behaved very differently to how they had in testing. Changes to the setup after free practice paid off: in qualifying on Saturday, all five Lamborghinis were within 171 thousandths of a second of each other.
“Our goal was to close the gap to the other Lamborghini teams,” said Thomas Biermaier, CEO of ABT Sportsline. “We managed to do that in the first qualifying session. Unfortunately, all the Lamborghinis were not competitive on Saturday. We were overtaken on the straights on both the left and right.”
On Sunday, all Lamborghinis were allowed to race with 15 kilograms less weight. Nevertheless, ABT Sportsline went backwards in qualifying. “We wanted to take another step forward with the setup and tried something that unfortunately didn’t work at all,” said Thomas Biermaier. “It was all the more important that the team did not give up and that the performance of both cars was strong in Sunday’s race. Mirko drove strongly. It’s a shame that Nicki’s race was ruined by the safety car. He was already in seventh place.”
“The second race was really fun,” said Nicki Thiim. “Even if you can’t see it in the results, we took a huge step forward compared to Oschersleben. We are definitely much closer now and I’m already looking forward to Zandvoort.”
“For me, it was two unlucky races with two incredibly good starts,” said Mirko Bortolotti. “I was able to make up a lot of places in both races. Unfortunately, I was spun around by Thierry Vermeulen on Saturday, which completely compromised our race. Nevertheless, we fought our way back into the points. On Sunday, there was contact with Ben Dörr. Without that, we might even have caused a small sensation. Losing seven or eight positions and then coming back to finish sixth is fantastic. A big thank you to the team. We’re not quite there yet and things are still going wrong sometimes. But we’re in a phase where we simply have to try out a lot of things to find the answers. We’ll learn from this. I am 100 per cent convinced that our time will come.”
Alongside the DTM, ABT Sportsline competed in the 24-hour qualifiers at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. The team enjoyed a positive conclusion to an intense weekend there as well with a fifth place on Sunday.