Look, I realise the toll the way the DTM ended last year had on the bloke who ‘should have won’ the 2021 title, our own F1-bound ‘golden boy’ Liam Lawson.
And because of the particularly bad taste combination of plain, simple old ‘desperate Dan’ driving & total lack of sportsmanship from South African Audi ‘ace’ Kelvin ‘KO’ van der Linde, and the absolutely ‘tone deaf’ decision by ‘proud German’ manufacturer Mercedes-Benz to stoop to team orders so that ‘their guy most likely,’ Max Gotz got to win the all-important final race of the season and in doing so deny Lawson the 2021 driver’s title by the narrowest of margins, (phew!) ….so, I can perfectly understand why the just turned 20-year-old did not want a bar of the storied German series in 2022.
In saying that – and speaking strictly personally here – I think that 1) it’s a real shame that ‘Young Liam’ is not returning for a second season, but that 2) it is really cool that compatriot Nick Cassidy has accepted an invitation from the Red Bull/AlphaTauri-backed AF Corse team to reprise his role as ‘super-backup’ driver for 2022.
This time though, Kiwi Cassidy, will compete in more than one round, effectively taking over the seat vacated by Alex Albon, the London-based Thai driver having returned to F1 with Williams this year.
Last year Albon started the DTM Series as one of the favourites courtesy of his prior two-year stint in F1, first with the Torro Rosso squad (which he joined in 2019) then alongside Max Verstappen in the Red Bull ‘proper; team in 2020.
The team then replaced him with Sergio Perez last year, so he took up the opportunity of what must have looked like a plum ‘fill-in’ job driving the lead Ferrari 488 GT3+ model (in Red Bull colours) for the Red Bull AlphaTauri AF Corse squad in the DTM.
As it turned out, however, it was our own Liam Lawson who made the bigger impression behind the wheel of the team’s second AlphaTauri (Red Bull’s fashion clothing label) 488, starting as he meant to go on by winning the first race of the season then going on to win two more races outright to lead the championship points standings heading into the final round at Germany’s atmospheric Norisring street circuit over the first weekend of October.
To his credit, Albon also won a race – the first one at the Nürburgring round, which he started from pole, but the 26-year-old never quite managed the metronomic-like consistency his younger and supposedly less experienced teammate did.
Having to miss two full rounds thanks to other commitments obviously didn’t help but at season’s end Liam Lawson had amassed 227 points, just three less than 2021 DTM Driver’s ‘champion’ Max Gotz but 19 more than South African ‘bad boy’ Kelvin van der Linden (Audi) who ended was third overall and 97 more than Alex Albon who ended up sixth overall.
Not so long ago I actually had grave fears for the future of the DTM (or, to call it by its full and proper name, the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters championship series).
I did because what once (and I have to admit this was ‘way’ back in the day which you a see from these YouTube clips from the late 1980s and mid 1990s was a series for lightly-modified road cars.
These were run by a healthy mix of factory-backed and proudly privateer teams, running lightly-modified road cars like BMW E30s, Mercedes-Benz 190s and (at least if you believed the stories) a pair of immaculate ‘Fox body’ Ford Mustangs owned, prepared and driven by a posse of V8-loving, USA obsessed ‘good old boys’ from the back blocks of Berlin, had morphed into a technology-driven money pit second only to F1 for BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Opel…..and may the manufacturer with the deepest pockets win!
The reason I had doubts that the series could actually survive, however, were based on the fact that manufacturers do not make ideal bed fellows and sure enough once Mercedes-Benz flagged its decision to up-stakes and leave in 2018, Aston Martin followed suite in 2019 , and Audi in 2020, leaving the prospect of BMW as the only works team.
For a while there, there was talk of a sort of ‘super-global’ Class 1 DTM/Super GT (JTCC) mash-up, but by the time a meeting was actually held (at Japan’s Fuji circuit in 2019 and with the first ever race going to our very own Nick Cassidy in a Lexus Team KeePer TOM’s LC500 GT500 class car, and which you can watch the official version above or a Vlog of the event by Nick himself below, the DTM was already in a power of trouble.
While the Super GT/JTCC category continued to enjoy both the technical and (I suppose the best word to use would be the ‘moral’) support of key Japanese manufacturers like Toyota and Honda, the DTM was -frankly – in trouble, and new series boss, ex F1 Ferrari driver Gerhard Burger, decided that a ‘ back-to-the-future’ approach was best.
Instead, for instance, of continuing to run its own set of rules along the lines of the FIA’s Silhouette-style touring car category, a GT3+ class was created to cater for all the many and varied, usually batch-built, GT3 sports coupes already out there making it as easy as possible for all sorts of teams to enter and compete against each other.
The decision obviously worked, and worked very well, because despite the PR disaster that the final round of the 2021 season turned into, the news is pretty much all good ahead of the 2022 series, which kicks off at the Portimão circuit in Portugal over the April 30-May y 01 weekend.
Several key changes have been made to the way the races are actually run, including the absolute outlawing of team orders plus a general streamlining of the processes and protocols associated with race starts, put together by new DTM race director, American, Scot Elkins.
Entries are up too – from 19 this time last year to 25 this year, amongst the new faces works or works-assisted entries from Porsche, BMW, and Lamborghini.
Now, if you had asked me this time last year if ‘a Kiwi could win the DTM?’ I would have laughed the question off.
I’ve got a lot of time for instance for now-28-year-old British-born but Auckland, NZ-raised Tom (son of Stig) Blomqvist, yet in three years (2015,26 & 17) competing in the DTM with top BMW squad Team Rowe, the best he could manage was 1 x win, 3 x pole positions and 3 x fastest race laps.
So, believe me when I say that what a 19-year-old Liam Lawson achieved last year by not only building an early season points lead then resolutely defending that lead until it was wrested off him by a bunch of bloody team lackies at Mercedes-Benz AMG was absolutely huge – and in fact will resonate around the motorsport world for years to come.
It is for this reason that it would have been nice to see him return this year and really stamp his authority on the category…
Still, Liam’s decision, instead, to focus on his 2022 FIA Formula 2 campaign would appear to be the correct one – having already won a race (at the second round at Jeddah last weekend) he is now second in the series points standings.
It will also be interesting to see how Nick Cassidy goes in the second Ferrari 488 this series this year. Interesting because this season Nick is not only the one doing double duty across a single seater and tin top class, but he is also doing it across motorsport’s current (sorry!!!) great divide, electricity (his other gig this year is with the Envision Formula E team) and fossil fuel.
Bottom line!
If anyone can match what Liam Lawson did in the DTM last year it is Nick Cassidy. So, in theory anyway the answer to the question I posed in the headline of my column this week is yes, a Kiwi can win the DTM this year….
In practice, it’s not going to be easy, but it sure is going to be another fantastic series to follow.
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