DTM points leader Ekstrom takes first win of 2017 at Red Bull Ring
Mattias Ekstrom took his first victory of the DTM season to extend his championship advantage in the first race of the penultimate round at the Red Bull Ring
Ekstrom was lying second behind Audi stablemate Jamie Green, before he passed the Briton easily into the uphill Turn 3 hairpin with five laps remaining.
The leading Audi trio of Ekstrom, Green and Nico Muller finished in formation after a race dominated by the Ingolstadt marque - the first race since the DTM scrapped the controversial performance-ballast rules.
The top non-Audi, Robert Wickens's Mercedes, was over a quarter of a lap adrift, and such was Audi's supremacy that it was able to manipulate the race to boost Ekstrom's title bid.
First Muller offered no resistance went Ekstrom swept past him for second on lap two; Muller jumped the points leader in the pitstops, but again he made it easy for the Swede to pass him once more.
Green's Team Rosberg RS5 had held a buffer of 4.8 seconds over Ekstrom's Abt machine before Ekstrom pitted.
Green stopped three laps later, and was 4.6s to the good at the end of his first lap on his new tyres.
Ekstrom slashed the gap to 1.2s within four laps, but it hovered around the 1.5s mark for most of the rest of the race before Green lost relative pace, and allowed Ekstrom to slip past.
Wickens's fourth place owed everything to a stunning first lap, in which he charged from seventh to fourth.
He spent the first stint fending off Marco Wittmann's BMW and Rene Rast's Audi, and then, after Wickens and Wittmann pitted together, the Canadian was still in front.
Rast stopped slightly later and leapfrogged them in the stops, but on cold tyres he could not resist the pressure.
Wickens picked up damage to the trim of his left-side car in the subsequent jostling, and then Rast effectively lost his outside title shot when he collided with Maxime Martin at the downhill Turn 4 while trying to repass the BMW.
Such was Wickens's pace that he had three-quarters of the field bottled up behind him for much of the second stint, before taking fourth ahead of Wittmann, Martin, Mike Rockenfeller, Lucas Auer, Edoardo Mortara and Timo Glock.
Mercedes driver Auer came into the weekend as Ekstrom's closest title challenger but, on home ground, he has now dropped to 31 points adrift, while Green's pole and second place have vaulted him from fifth to second in the standings.
Race one result
Pos | Driver | Team | Car | Laps | Gap |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Mattias Ekstrom | Abt | Audi | 40 | 57m00.812s |
2 | Jamie Green | Rosberg | Audi | 40 | 0.398s |
3 | Nico Muller | Abt | Audi | 40 | 0.602s |
4 | Robert Wickens | HWA | Mercedes | 40 | 21.625s |
5 | Marco Wittmann | RMG | BMW | 40 | 22.118s |
6 | Maxime Martin | RBM | BMW | 40 | 22.748s |
7 | Mike Rockenfeller | Phoenix | Audi | 40 | 23.067s |
8 | Lucas Auer | HWA | Mercedes | 40 | 23.452s |
9 | Edoardo Mortara | HWA | Mercedes | 40 | 23.761s |
10 | Timo Glock | RMR | BMW | 40 | 25.559s |
11 | Paul Di Resta | HWA | Mercedes | 40 | 25.938s |
12 | Bruno Spengler | RBM | BMW | 40 | 26.447s |
13 | Rene Rast | Rosberg | Audi | 40 | 26.788s |
14 | Loic Duval | Phoenix | Audi | 40 | 27.096s |
15 | Maro Engel | HWA | Mercedes | 40 | 27.514s |
16 | Tom Blomqvist | RMR | BMW | 40 | 32.951s |
17 | Gary Paffett | HWA | Mercedes | 40 | 1m15.721s |
- | Augusto Farfus | RMG | BMW | 28 | Retirement |
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