How the DTM landed itself in crisis

Two down, one to go. Ever since Mercedes announced its plans to pull the plug on its DTM involvement in favour of Formula E in the summer of 2017, it has felt like the German tin-top championship has been on a slippery downward slope.

And following Monday's news of Audi - to use the prevailing corporate jargon - "realigning" its motorsport priorities in 2020, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the DTM now finds itself in a full-on nosedive, its very existence hanging in the balance.

The coronavirus pandemic gave Audi the cover it needed to announce a decision it looked like it was heading inexorably towards anyway. Back in February, Autosport revealed that the twin pressures of cost-saving imperatives and an internal restructuring had put the brand's DTM involvement on shaky ground.

Essentially, Audi had to choose which of its two factory programmes - Formula E and DTM - to drop for 2021, and in the current climate the latter was always going to lose out, even if the COVID-19 crisis probably meant that decision was reached quicker than expected.

BMW now remains as the only manufacturer in the DTM, and the prospects of finding another marque willing to fill in for Audi at such short notice appear to be nil, despite the frantic efforts of ITR chairman Gerhard Berger ever since Mercedes announced its exit.

Berger deserves credit for brokering the R-Motorsport Aston Martin deal that ensured a nominal third manufacturer and a full-ish grid last year, but the project was so late to be realised that the Swiss entrant could never recover the ground it lost at the start of the season, particularly given the complexities of the new-for-2019 turbocharged engines.

The split with engine partner HWA meant R-Motorsport was facing another season of uphill struggles in 2020 before it finally decided to pull the plug, and the Vantage DTMs now seem set to live out the rest of their lives as track day cars and museum pieces.

Seeing how badly R-Motorsport struggled last year would have hardly encouraged any newcomers to step forward

Hopes in some quarters that one of the Japanese manufacturers that make up SUPER GT's top class - Honda, Nissan and Toyota - might eventually move across to the DTM full-time were also delusional, despite the much-vaunted Class One regulation alignment.

The most logical candidate would have been Toyota, given its Cologne base, but any entry into the DTM would probably have to have been at the expense of its LMP1 project which has delivered back-to-back Le Mans 24 Hours wins. In other words, not happening.

As Hans-Joachim Stuck - Audi's first DTM title-winner back in 1990 - pointed out in a recent interview, any new manufacturer would face a massive disadvantage against the accumulated experience of Audi and BMW. And seeing how badly R-Motorsport struggled last year would have hardly encouraged any newcomers to step forward.

"I can't imagine that a Japanese manufacturer would join DTM permanently or that DTM cars would be permanently used in Japan," said Stuck, who resigned from his role as the president of the German motorsport federation, the DMSB, in February.

"After all, I was involved in several discussions and didn't see any future prospects. Especially not now [with the coronavirus crisis].

"A Japanese marque would start at zero in a series where the others have years of experience.

"We saw with Aston Martin how far they were from winning. How long can a manufacturer keep that up?"

Could the likes of Phoenix, Rosberg and WRT continue fielding their RS5s to bulk out a field dominated by BMW? Given that Phoenix boss Ernst Moser recently said that his team was facing the "worst crisis" of its history, it seems impossible that they could continue without help from Audi, perhaps with the exception of WRT with its different funding model.

BMW was also finding itself under pressure to cut costs last year, to the point that it couldn't guarantee six factory-entered cars for 2020, so the idea of the Bavarian marque suddenly expanding to 10 or 12 cars just for the sake of saving the DTM is for the birds.

In a post-coronavirus age, the Class One ideal suddenly seems like an unaffordable luxury. High-tech, petrol-powered touring cars in a semi-national championship don't fulfil the marketing objectives for enough manufacturers to justify their expense, and at 5-6 million euros for a two-car team, they're too pricey for privateers to run on their own.

The concept will live on in SUPER GT, but despite the push towards harmonisation the Class One rulebook still gives the Japanese marques quite a bit of leeway to do things their own way - so, as Jenson Button said in his final appearance in the series last year, it's better to think of the GT500 rules as a sort-of 'Class 1-J' rather than being identical to DTM rules.

So, what to do? In an interview with Autosport in February, Berger was asked point blank whether he felt Audi leaving the DTM would sound the death knell for the series, and his response now seems telling, as if he was already contemplating life after Class One.

"No, you also have to differentiate here," said the 10-time Formula 1 grand prix winner. "The DTM is a strong platform. What I mean by that is, on a DTM race weekend, in addition to the DTM, numerous other series also race, with a wide variety of brands.

"When I am talking about the platform, I am not talking only about DTM with Class One cars."

So now the question is less whether the DTM as we currently know it can be saved, and more whether Berger and the ITR can salvage their platform and build something new on top of it. There are certainly no easy options in this regard; even Stuck's suggestion of moving to GT3s appears to be fraught with difficulties.

The ADAC GT Masters already functions as Germany's national series for GT3 cars, while any attempt to run a more European schedule would inevitably look somewhat similar to the SRO-run GT World Challenge Europe (formerly the Blancpain GT Series).

This crisis is an opportunity for the ITR to work out exactly where a reborn DTM could fit within the ever-shifting motorsport landscape

Standing out from the crowd would be difficult, and then there are other questions to consider - would full manufacturer teams be allowed? Would Balance of Performance be used?

But perhaps this crisis is an opportunity for the ITR to work out exactly where a reborn DTM could fit within the ever-shifting motorsport landscape, given that in recent years the championship has appeared to become somewhat contradictory.

While the series' international ambitions hadn't spiralled out of control quite as spectacularly as the doomed International Touring Car Championship (the series that the 'original' DTM morphed into in 1996), it wasn't content either to be a German national championship, even openly floating the idea of ditching its name to reflect that.

Equally, the championship's Class One machinery had evolved into something that wasn't quite recognisably a touring car or stock car, but also wasn't definitively a sportscar either. It prided itself on being loud, brash and old-school, yet last year decided it had no option but to adopt hybridisation for 2022 in what seemed to be a repudiation of those values.

There will be some challenging months ahead for the ITR as it grapples with those questions and attempts to forge a new path. For a series once regarded as second only to F1 in terms of its professionalism and the quality of its drivers, this could be a painful process, but there's no doubt now following Audi's decision that it's a necessary one.