Mortara feels bad for Misano DTM crash with team-mate Gary Paffett

The DTM's first night race began with Paffett and Mortara in second and third early on, with the latter stopping two laps earlier than his team-mate.

Once Paffett made his mandatory swap, Mortara made small contact with his rival after running wide at Turn 8 when sizing up a potential overtake.

Paffett locked up at the same corner a lap later and Mortara ran wide under attack from BMW's Philipp Eng, with the Italian sandwiched between the two before hitting Paffett and ending his race.

"I had to overcome quite a lot of issues during this race," said Mortara. "The contact with Gary maybe [made it] more difficult than actually could have been.

"The big squeeze with Gary and Philipp, I was in the middle, I couldn't really do anything. That was shit. There are no other words, I felt bad because he had to retire.

"The last thing I wanted [was for] Gary to retire, we've been team-mates also in Spa [24 Hours], I like the guy so I felt bad.

"Obviously I had half of the car missing [after] and with these cars the aero is pretty important so that was not ideal."

Paffett lost 25 points to the victorious Paul di Resta on Saturday and lost his title lead to the ex-Formula 1 driver by nine points following Sunday evening's race, having finished 14th after Dani Juncadella pushed him into a spin.

The 2005 DTM champion said that he has no problem with Mortara.

"We're fine, things happen," said Paffett. "I'm not dwelling on what happened, it happened and we don't like to apportion blame here or there.

"It is just the case of having a discussion about it which we did and moving on and trying again.

"Our goal was to score points, but we threw our chances overboard ourselves. We made it hard on ourselves.

"The car didn't make it hard for us, because it was good. I drove quite well and the car was good both in the dry and in the wet.

"Unfortunately, some things went wrong in this race. We need to see what decisions we've made. There was a little luck with that, but it wasn't the first race for us in which it starts raining in the middle."

Di Resta said he had "mixed feelings" about his Misano weekend, but "all in all, what counts is that I took the lead in the championship six races before the end of the season".