Gary Paffett: 100 not out

This weekend's DTM round at Oschersleben represents a landmark race for Gary Paffett, as he chalks up his 100th start in the series.

The Briton, who debuted midway through the 2003 season, has won more races - 20 - than anybody bar Bernd Schneider and Klaus Ludwig, and has been one of the best-performing drivers throughout that period.

His number of starts, which includes the non-championship Shanghai street race he won in 2004, is an indication of the regard with which he is held at Mercedes and in the eyes of the championship's mass of fans.

It wasn't always like this though. Once upon a time Paffett had it all to prove...

HOW IT STARTED

After winning the 2002 German Formula 3 title with Team Rosberg, Paffett seemed to be heading towards grand prix racing.

But an abortive F3000 campaign with new team Brand Motorsport, which lasted just a single race at Imola the following season, left the 1999 McLaren AUTOSPORT BRDC Award winner with limited options.

"I'd actually been offered a DTM seat with Mercedes for 2003, but I'd said no because I wanted to stay in single-seaters," he recalls.

Paffett en route to his first F3 win of the season at Oschersleben in 2001 © LAT

"Then I went to F3000 with a new team as team-mate to Nicolas Minassian and found myself without a drive about six weeks later when it shut down.

"I was pretty lucky to get a call from Arno Zensen at Team Rosberg, who'd had a problem with a driver during the winter and had been running Patrick Huisman on a race-by-race basis while he found one.

"Arno had run me to the German F3 title so I knew how his team worked and liked it, so the fact that he was also running Mercs in the DTM made it an easy sell to me."

Paffett did not finish his debut race at the Nurburgring, but made the paddock sit up when he finished sixth at Spielberg after employing an ultra-long first stint.

That was his ticket to the big time with the manufacturer's crack HWA team, and led to a deserved title success in 2005.

After leaving the DTM to take a job as a McLaren F1 test driver (a role he continues to hold eight years later), Paffett returned in 2007 in year-old machinery run by Persson Motorsport, and became the first driver to win in a car of such status.

Some more top-drawer driving led to his return to HWA and to the front of the pack, the Brit finishing as the championship runner-up three times in four years from 2009-12.

But what are the memories he cherishes most, and the incidents he'd most like to forget? AUTOSPORT asked him.

BEST RACE

"Norisring 2005 stands out because I was in the middle of a championship fight with Mattias Ekstrom and was behind him on the track when we had a safety car.

Norisring 2005: Paffett's finest race in the DTM

"The two of us missed the pit entrance first time round and everyone else pitted, so we were at a big disadvantage.

"The team decided that I should do two stops in two laps to minimise the damage and I ended up coming back to win from about P10, passing 'Eki' on the way.

"There have been some other good moments, like clinching the title in Turkey later that year, or winning in front of my home crowd at Brands Hatch in 2012, but that particular Norisring race will always stand out that little bit more because of how hard I drove. It was incredible."

WORST RACE

"There are a lot. Zandvoort last year stands out as a particularly painful one because of the consequences. I would have easily been third until the incident with Martin Tomczyk that dropped us down a few places and eventually cost us the championship.

"I can take a race where I'm not really in the hunt. It's much harder to stomach a race when you're in the game and then don't get the result you deserve. Norisring this year was a good example of that; really disappointing."

BEST CAR

"I'd go for the Mercedes C-class I raced in 2005, the year I won the championship. It was only my second full year in the HWA team and the car was strong all year; the best compared to the opposition that I've ever had.

"It was an easy car to set up for any kind of circuit and it meant both myself and my team-mates could be consistently quick everywhere.

"When you have that, it's not too difficult to build a championship-winning programme. It was easy to drive with good grip, a good top speed and good downforce. It was even better than last year's C-coupe, which is saying something."

In a year-old 2007 C-class, Paffett failed to score a podium in 2008 © LAT

WORST CAR

"The weakest machine Mercedes produced was probably the 2007 C-class, which I then raced as a year-old machine in '08.

"The '07 car was a totally new shape to the previous year and wasn't even particularly strong in its first year.

"So having it as an old car was really difficult."

BEST RIVAL

"Mattias Ekstrom, and by quite some margin too. He and I had a few altercations during my first 18 months in the DTM, but we settled our differences pretty quickly and ever since then we've got on extremely well both on and off the track.

"We've raced each other in a pretty tough manner over the years; maybe a bit tougher than either of us would like, but it's usually been fair and we have a lot of respect for each other's driving.

"Yes, we're friends away from the track, but that doesn't mean you back off or give extra room when you're racing. We're still fiercely competitive. We've had times when we've done practice starts in a Friday session and then raced each other back to the pits, even though it counts for nothing.

"He's been my best rival and my fairest. He's the guy I like to race with the most, although Bruno Spengler is very good too in that respect."

WORST RIVAL

"Tom Kristensen, because he and I had so many on-track incidents when he was doing the DTM. It was like our cars were magnets for damage - damage from each other.

With 'worst rival' Kristensen on the Hockenheim podium © XPB

"My engineer always used to dread any time we qualified near each other because he knew we'd end up getting together.

"That race I mentioned as the best I've had in the DTM was made even more special by some of the incredible things Tom did to me on-track that day. He nearly put me in a concrete wall on three or four occasions.

"We get on fine now and I never really had a problem with him off the track. It just seemed odd that it was always the same guy that I kept having these incidents with - much in the same way I do with Martin Tomczyk now."

BEST TEAM-MATE

"It depends on what you want from a team-mate. If it's someone that's chilled out and just creates a nice atmosphere in the team, then it's Jean Alesi.

"Bernd Schneider was fantastic too. He never tried to be the big 'I am', despite the fact that he was a complete legend. He was always really helpful with advice.

"But the absolute best team-mate I had was Paul di Resta, who became a very close friend of mine during his time at Mercedes.

"His performances in the car were outstanding and he and I used to work very well together to try and develop a car. We also got on very well off the track.

WORST TEAM-MATE

"It would be unfair to put that tag on Alex Margaritis, but let's say I found it difficult to form a good working relationship with him.

"That year Paul and I were doing really well and Alex developed a complex that somehow he wasn't getting equal treatment, and that Paul and I were ganging up on him in debriefs.

"His answer was to go off and have his own meetings with engineers and not really spend any time with us, so that wasn't the easiest of situations.

"I think a lot of people might have expected me to answer this question with the name 'Bruno Spengler', but to be honest, any difficulties we had - and we did have some towards the end - grew out of how intense the competition had become between us within Mercedes.

"People forget that he and I shared a truck for three or four years without any problems, and we do still speak now. It was just a difficult situation for a little while."

AUTOSPORT will broadcast live video of both the race and qualifying from the Oschersleben DTM event this weekend.

You can catch all the qualifying and race action from Germany from 1.30pm BST on Saturday and 12.30pm on Sunday.