In the DTM they went from having 8 cars per team to 6. The teams therefore had to fire drivers. The ‘cut’ affected 9 drivers in total and that will have its effect domino in the rest of championships.
Mercedes today announced its lineup. It was the last team to announce their drivers, and the surprise to highlight is the presence of Maro Engel in the team.
As expected, Dani Juncadella and Maximilian Götz did not continue, but neither Felix Rosenqvist nor Christian Vietoris. Edoardo Mortara and Maro Engel entered instead.
BMW had already announced in a very elegant way that they would expel Martin Tomzcyck, who retired from the DTM after years in the category and win a championship and António Félix Da Costa, who only showed sparks of what he is able to do, being very irregular.
Da Costa left the DTM ‘to focus on the Formula E’, something difficult to believe, because when the calendar overlapped, always ran DTM. The rest of the squad continues as it was in 2016.
Audi suffered the departure of Edo Mortara, one of its maximum figures heading for Mercedes. Then Timo Scheider retired and decided not to renew Adrien Tambay of opaque results nor to Miguel Molina. Loïc Duval, who also runs in Formula E, found a seat after the Audi exit from the WEC. Another one that entered the equipment was Rene Rast, that when it happened to replace to him to a companion did it quite well, besides showing his credentials long ago being one of the best pilots in LMP2, and when running with the third LMP1 of Audi in The WEC.
In search of work
Right now, many hierarchy pilots are looking for seats. The most likely to be ejected will run in GTs or LMP2, a radical change after piloting in a category as difficult and prestigious as the DTM. But they can take advantage and run in Formula E or WEC when the dates coincides to some drivers.
Now Dani Juncadella has started to speak well of Formula E, being previously one of the most critical of the electric category. António Félix Da Costa left the DTM supposedly to focus on Formula E, but stated that he was looking for a seat on SuperFormula or LMP2, and recently stated that they are looking for an IndyCar seat.
In Formula E they will have problems with the calendar: Buemi, Prost, Piquet Jr, Sarrazin, Bird, Lopez (WEC) and Duval (DTM). There, there will be momentary voids in Virgin, Renault, Venturi, NextEV and Dragon. Those holes hope to take advantage of Alex Lynn (Virgin reserve), Esteban Gutierrez (Dragon reserve) and some expelled from the DTM.
Of the 18 drivers only 4 are German. Mercedes has Engel, BMW to Wittmann and Audi to Rockenfeller and Rast.
The 2017 is a selection of very good drivers and experienced. And for young drivers will be very difficult to enter the category, they must show that they are very, very good first.
The Grid
- BMW:Wittmann/Spengler/Blomqvist/Glock/Farfus/Martin.
- Mercedes: Mortara/Di Resta/Wickens/Auer/Paffett/Engel.
- Audi:Green/Ekstroem/Rockenfeller/Müller/Rast/Duval.