The inside story of Dovizioso's DTM debut

In the hours leading up to the DTM's final race at Misano, two-time series champion Mattias Ekstrom gave a perfect insight into the sort of teacher he was for MotoGP star Andrea Dovizioso during his guest drive weekend.

"I told him before [the weekend], if you want to let everybody go it makes no sense to go racing. There are the rules that I expect him to follow - which he has done [on Saturday]. If someone breaks the rules, we take no crap from no one - if someone behaves badly, you give it back. It's 'OK if you do it, I'll do the same'."

Those are the rules of conduct in wheel-to-wheel battling for someone stepping off a MotoGP bike and into a tin-top that produces over 600bhp, plenty of downforce, and has tricky-to-manage tyres, but Ekstrom's mentorship was exactly what Dovizioso needed.

Ekstrom was a key player in Dovizioso getting the drive, having experienced the Ducati rider's car-racing ability first-hand in 2016 when Dovizioso drove an EKS-prepared World Rallycross car in the Alps for a 'SuperQ' competition that placed motorsport stars against alpine skiers in a series of challenges.

"Mattias worked with me because he saw me in a rallycross car," explained Dovizioso ahead of the Misano sessions. "He thought I could be competitive enough not to embarrass myself.

"I met him a long time ago, and the feeling was right from the start because we're pretty much alike. The relationship with him is very important."

Forget the fact that 48 hours later Dovizioso added a 15th place finish to his Saturday result of 12th. In reality, assessing him by the leaderboard is a futile exercise since he was always likely to be ahead of R-Motorsport's Aston Martins at Misano, a high-speed circuit that punished the weaknesses of the new and underpowered Astons.

Then there's the fact that his best result of 12th came in yet another race in which the order was turned on its head by a safety car - Misano's long pitlane enabled first-lap stopper Marco Wittmann to go from 18th to victory.

Instead, the best way to measure Dovizioso is by his rate of improvement. He came into the weekend having logged over 180 laps in a two-day test alongside Ekstrom - who was only allowed to set 20 comparison laps - and practised situations such as pitstops and restarts. Plans for simulator work had to be scrapped because Dovizioso's MotoGP commitments made it impossible to fit in the schedule.

"Driving the car to its limit with the used tyre, or driving the car to the limit in the new tyres - I saw in the test it was quite [a] big [gap]. But with the track evolution on top [this weekend], I think you then see he is lacking experience." Mattias Ekstrom

From that baseline, there was one clear area of weakness for Dovizioso. Despite regular guidance from Ekstrom and the full-season Audi drivers, he was unable to commit to the car racing line - particularly over kerbs. It was an alien concept for a man that had won here in MotoGP just a year earlier.

"I don't have a lot of experience in the car so it's quite strange to me," he said. "It's really powerful, a lot of power everywhere and it's not easy to manage the power because you have to open up [the throttle] very early.

"At the beginning, I was struggling to open the throttle very fast because on the bike you try to be very smooth and try to work on the exit.

"The DTM car is the opposite, you have very different lines. And it is not easy. The real first time I can feel the downforce and I've never tried something like that. When I came here [during testing] in the fast corners it took six laps to go completely flat at the corner. I was scared in that situation but when I did it I could feel a lot of stability from the car and a lot of new stuff for me to manage in the car."

With that in mind, Autosport then watched Dovizioso trackside during FP1 to assess his approach. Turn 13 is one of the more difficult corners; the usual approach is heavy braking after going through two-high speed kinks following a long straight. Releasing the brake, the conventional line puts the majority of the car over the inside kerb before sweeping back to the outside line and braking hard for the Turn 14 hairpin.

Immediately, Dovizioso was hesitant. There were several lock-ups right before turn-in at Turn 13 and he never fully committed to the kerbs. But then he revealed a very Fernando Alonso-esque approach. By backing off and following other cars, it was clear to see the MotoGP rider was beginning to apply their line and grew in confidence. The innate logic behind seeing a weakness and using every asset to learn quickly was a theme of his weekend. By the end of practice, Dovizioso had moved from 2.1s off the leading car in FP1 to 1.8s in the similar conditions of FP2.

Qualifying proved Dovizioso's next weakness to overcome and he struggled to extract immediate performance from a new set of tyres, proved when he suffered a minor crash in Sunday's session. He made a mistake on his first flying lap at the tight Turn 14 hairpin, locking up and drifting wide into the gravel before gently touching the barrier. Ekstrom deemed it caused by a lack of focus but expanded on why Dovizioso struggled.

"For me, it's not the way he [Dovizioso] is driving - it's that specific thing with new tyres and track conditions," Ekstrom says. "It's so big and it takes a while [to understand it].

"Driving the car to its limit with the used tyre, or driving the car to the limit in the new tyres - I saw in the test it was quite [a] big [gap]. But with the track evolution on top [this weekend], I think you then see he is lacking experience. Even regulars, including myself, for many years, struggled to anticipate the grip and have that feeling [of tyre understanding].

"That's the most difficult thing for him in qualifying. With the used tyres [in race conditions], he knows how to handle it and that's easy."

That used-tyre pace stood out during the full-race onboards from Dovizioso's car on Saturday and Sunday, but there were several elements that demonstrated not only his learning curve, but also the approach he took to minimise it. Comparing Saturday with Sunday, the first race was notable for the amount of discussion between Dovizioso and his race engineer on the grid before the formation lap.

Over the course of several minutes, Dovizioso was talked through the use of brake bias and how he would need to alter it during the race to manage degradation, as well as how to heat the front tyres during the formation lap. As he weaved during that lap, he was coached where to brake hard to generate heat and he responded with his own questions throughout. Come Sunday, there was considerably less chatter pre-race.

Away from radio communication, another area Dovizioso took a sizeable step forward in was one of the DTM's hardest challenges - the race start. The 2019 Class One cars do not have the previous car's brake valve to help modulate the start. It means drivers are still searching for the optimum method to find the bite point, launch and avoid the turbocharger's tendency to cause the car to bog down. On Saturday, Dovizioso fell into the trap and went from 15th to 18th. But the next day his launch was superb and he gained a place from 14th, setting himself up perfectly to gain another few through the first lap.

It's tricky to summarise conclusively how good Dovizioso's debut was. Sebastien Ogier did a guest start at the Red Bull Ring, but has four-wheel experience mainly from rallying.

"I had a spectacular clutch release at the start, Audi told me that I was one of the best in general, but already in practice, I saw that the starts came to me very well.

"In the first two corners, I slipped up [trying to] find the right gap [to overtake], then came out strong at Turn 6 and passed two other cars going wide and took advantage of the acceleration on the outside.

"Up to that point it was wonderful, then we returned to reality - to deal with [those] who were a step stronger than me."

Reality may well have hit Dovizioso but he managed to engineer himself into several positions where he could try wheel-to-wheel battles.

Intriguingly, it came from an area Dovizioso struggled to get to grips with. Ekstrom told Autosport that Dovizioso always featured so highly in the speed traps because his natural driving style related to MotoGP in that he sets up the car to maximise exit speed, but was giving up too much on corner entry and mid-corner in the process.

"When people see it - they say 'he has too much power!'. I say 'keep dreaming'," said Ekstrom.

"He has a driving way that focuses a lot on exits. I try to teach him to trail brake into the corner and coast at a higher minimum speed and get on the gas a bit less aggressively and so on.

"I don't say he should do it the opposite [of his own style], he just needs to tune his driving and round them up in some areas."

That meant Dovizioso was often losing time at the Turns 4-6 complex but then rapidly gaining on the long run to Turn 7, and he used that style on the restart to have a contest with the R-Motorsport cars and the Audi of Pietro Fittipaldi.

He tried a similar duel with BMW's Bruno Spengler on Sunday, ultimately losing out, and he then made his second major mistake of the weekend when he carried too much speed into Turn 16 on old tyres, unsettled the car on the undulations, and took a spin off the track.

He did show promise in that his Saturday issue of struggling to manage the tyres, manifesting itself in an unsettled rear, was under control and the time loss over a stint was comparable to the leading Audis, if a little weaker.

It's tricky to summarise conclusively how good Dovizioso's debut was. Sebastien Ogier did a guest start at the Red Bull Ring, but has four-wheel experience mainly from rallying. Alex Zanardi shone at Misano last year, but it was in wet conditions at night and he had fairly recent World Touring Car Championship and Blancpain experience to draw on.

"A season may be enough to get close to the best of the DTM, but certainly not to reach their level," says Dovizioso. "It depends on so many factors and aspects that I personally don't know about the cars, so it's useless to dwell on that.

"But in a year here [in the DTM], you can learn many things. [After] having had very little time to try [and adapt], clearly it was impossible for me to learn fully with the engineers, drivers and the environment.

"[Doing DTM] for a long time will surely help you grow to have the car completely under control. There are so many aspects that I can improve: they showed me the data and you understand what others are doing. But hearing the car and understanding what is happening are aspects that require more time."

A final twist in the weekend came on Sunday when Sat.1's Andrea Kaiser spoke to Valentino Rossi about Dovizioso's weekend and the Yamaha rider confirmed he had had an offer to drive at Misano this year, and promised Gerhard Berger he would do it in the near future - much to the broadcast team's excitement.

The DTM/MotoGP link is likely to be explored again as part of the push to make Misano popular. The first attempt with one of the two-wheeled world's best talents suggests the likes of Dovizioso and Rossi are more than up to the task.