Ex-Formula 1 driver Timo Glock admits BMW trailing DTM rivals

BMW drivers won five of the nine races in 2014, including four through eventual champion Marco Wittmann, but in the dry Saturday race at the season-opener the marque could manage no higher than Maxime Martin's seventh.

Fortunes improved slightly on the wet Sunday, with Martin Tomczyk fourth and Wittmann fifth, while Glock's best result was eighth on Saturday from 20th on the grid.

The ex-Formula 1 racer says there is work to be done, particularly to solve a puzzling lack of single-lap pace.

"I think we are a bit behind at the moment, definitely," he told AUTOSPORT.

"I think it looks like Audi and Mercedes - definitely Audi - is a step ahead.

"Just for us, as a team, we struggled too much in qualifying to get anything out of the new tyres.

"We have no idea why all of a sudden that is; we never had it last year, but already at Oschersleben in the test we struggled and now again.

"So we need to find out where the problem actually is."

Motorsport chief Jens Marquardt said BMW would investigate the shortfall before the Lausitzring hosts the second round on May 29-31.

"I think we need to make a thorough investigation into our qualifying performance, and then our resulting race performance, because the set-up that you qualify on, you race on," he said.

"What I got out of the comments from the drivers is that somehow we didn't get the peak of the tyre.

"Our guys were sometimes doing the fastest [lap] on the second lap, whereas everyone else had really juicy, peaky first laps and this we couldn't achieve."