The 2022 DTM preseason has closed its doors. The second day of testing at the Portimao circuit has finished with Dennis Olsen and his Porsche 911 GT3 R at the top of the time table after signing a time of 1:41.378. Nico Müller finished second, a little less than three tenths, in a result that allows him to break Audi’s hegemony. Until this last day of tests there was always an Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II at the top of the classification. Abrupt end with accident for Marco Wittmann.
The last test session of the DTM started at 5:00 p.m. in order to allow TCR Europe to also complete its tests on the Portuguese track. Nevertheless, the activity was stopped an hour later as a result of Marco Wittmann’s serious accident. The Walkenhorst Motorsport driver had an exit at turn 7, a mishap that caused serious damage to the left side of the front of his BMW M4 GT3. Although there is no official confirmation, a technical problem is suspected as the cause of this mishap.
Despite the shock and the damage to the car, Marco Wittmann will not have a big disadvantage over his rivals, among other things because the activity on the track was drastically reduced after 8:00 p.m., when it was getting dark. In fact, as in the previous day, the last hour of the test was on an empty track, since no one jumped onto the track since 9:00 p.m. and dedicated themselves to testing in the pits. By then, Dennis Olsen already had the 1:41.378 that accredited him as the best driver in the test. Nico Müller and Nicki Thiim completed the ‘top 3’ of the day.
Ricardo Feller and Thomas Preining were in charge of closing the first five positionsin a clear display of the strong performance of the Audi and Porsche GT3s, even if the lap times were 1.5 seconds slower than the AVL simulations. A scenario in which there is a certain means to ‘sandbagging’, but in which it seems that the different GT3 alternate strengths and weaknesses. In fact, a total of 23 vehicles finished less than second at the end of the second day of tests in Portimao.
Photos: DTM