After two fastest times for Mercedes-Benz on Friday, Audi countered on Saturday morning: thee Audi A4 DTMs in first through third place. Fastest in the final practice session before qualifying was Barcelona winner Martin Tomczyk. The driver from Rosenheim lapped the 4.574 kilometres long Hockenheimring in 1.34.821 minutes, but wasn’t entirely satisfied: “Here, the weather is mixing up everything. Thus, we are losing a lot of time in testing and we basically had only one go.” This was spot-on, and made Tomczyk say: “Now, we must continue this performance in qualifying.” Second place went to Christian Abt with a 2005-spec car, 0.366 seconds down. The Audi-trio on top of the time sheets was completed by Mattias Ekström. Fastest Mercedes-Benz-driver was Mika Häkkinen in fourth place.
Bernd Schneider, who already secured himself the title in the ninth DTM round at Le Mans (France), was taking it rather easy in the 60 minutes’ free practice session: behind his fellow-Mercedes driver Bruno Spengler and the two Audi-drivers Frank Stippler and Pierre Kaffer in sixth and seventh place, the five-times’ DTM champion was eighth. With Timo Scheider in ninth place and Alexandros Margaritis in tenth position, two more drivers with cars from last year made it into the top 10, making it a total of five drivers with 2005-spec cars among the first 10.
Like the first test on Friday, the free practice session also didn’t bring any new insights as far as set-up was concerned: conditions on the track were changing too much. Only towards the end of the session, the 20 DTM drivers were able to switch to slick tyres. After a spectacular accident of Vanina Ickx, the session had to be interrupted for 15 minutes just before the end. Under braking for the hairpin, the rear of her Audi A4 DTM slid out and the Belgian lady racer hit the barrier. Ickx remained unscathed. Once the heavily damaged car had been recovered, the session could be continued.
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