TALK about great timing – DTM at Brands Hatch

When friends of mine – based in London – decided to get hitched and sent the invite to the nuptials my way, naturally the first thing I did (after locking in my attendance to the wedding, of course) was check the international racing schedule.

There’s always something going on in Europe so the odds were good that I’d be able to time the trip with some motorsport – and sure enough, the motorsport gods smiled down on yours truly.

As well as lining up some work at the World Endurance Championship event at Silverstone, it turned out the DTM was also in action at Brands Hatch.

Two mega circuits that were always on the bucket list.. How could I say no?

It was thus that on a warm yet overcast Sunday we headed to the South East of London to check out one of the world’s most famous circuits – and a touring car category hailed as one of the best around.

It would prove an interesting trip.

Like many circuits with proper elevation, Brands Hatch’s Paddock Hill Bend is steeper than it looks on television.

From the viewing area on the corner exit, the ribbon of tarmac comes into view at the exit of pit lane – it climbs gradually while at the same time showing it’s banking with camber to drivers’ right and deceptively quick.

Though the drop from the apex down to the compression at the bottom of the hill looks steep on TV, it is more dramatic a change in undulation in real life: cars violently plummeting what I can only guess is 20-25 meters of elevation change in about the same distance, before instantly climbing again into the Druids hairpin.

From the exit of Paddock Hill, you can’t see cars in pit lane but you can hear them and it’s in that way we receive our first introduction to the cars of the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters – DTM – the German idea of what a Touring Car Formula should be.

As the cars, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW alike, get to the control line and disengage their speed limiters it’s like being projected into the world of Formula 1 in the mid-1990s, for these cars could easily be powered by a Cosworth DFZ V8.

Whereas a NASCAR V8 registers on the lower end of the audio spectrum (it’s all bass) and an Aussie Supercar is somewhere in the middle – bassy down low before rising to a gravelly baritone as it rises up the rev range – a DTM V8 is at the other end entirely.

At lower revolutions it’s pure Cosworth and as it rises to the 9,000 RPM limit it becomes almost a shriek, ranging in on the upper limit of what ears can generally tolerate. They sound like Formula One cars with bodywork. To an open wheel purist, especially, they sound fantastic.

At just over 1,100kg the cars are light and they are bestowed with ridiculous amount of downforce, even in their reduced 2018-specification. It means they are shatteringly quick and visually they are more like an open-wheeler in the way they behave, rather than a Touring Car.

There’s no lumbering here – the cars rotate into a corner with remarkable speed; true ‘aero’ racers using their downforce and braking performance to enter a corner quicker than you’d think a C-Class Mercedes or Audi A4 really should.

On the full Brands Hatch Grand Prix circuit, which by the way is a wonderfully old-school throwback to the days where OH&S were secondary to making an awesome circuit lodged in the middle of a forest, they are impressive.

On their first ever run on the long track, Mercedes’ driver Gary Paffett’s pole time of 1m17.94s was five seconds quicker than the GT3 lap record and thirteen up on the British Touring Car Benchmark.

Perhaps more impressively, the cars are only five seconds slower than A1GP racers lapped the nearly 4-km circuit the last time they visited.

The 2018-specification format the championship is using is run over two days, with a practice, qualifying and 55-minute race plus one lap held on each day.

For a category running at this level and this expense it doesn’t seem like an enormous amount of track time.

And because the cars are what they are, and because Brands is hard to overtake on at the best of times, the racing definitely leans more to Formula One than it does crash-n-bash Touring Cars.

This is where our domestic category, Supercars, bridges the gap well; it has enough combat to be entertaining but enough strategy to generally keep the propeller heads happy. DTM is a more cerebral affair.

Overtaking is hard and races rely on qualifying and early track position to deliver results. In 55-minutes, the number of strategic opportunities to ‘roll the dice’ are significantly less than, say, a 200-km Supercars Sunday.

And yet this is generally OK because 55-minutes is a nice enough time to enjoy loud and fast racing cars passing by even if they aren’t exactly putting on the best show.

The DTM is in an interesting phase of evolution, as Gerhard Berger leads it towards convergence with Japan’s GT series which can hopefully create a new era of international racing which is likely to have a fascinating crossover of Germanic efficiency and Japanese idiosyncrasy that could be a compelling mix.

Should they keep the visceral nature the DTM cars currently enjoy, and add some more encouragement for wheel-to-wheel combat rather than Formula One-style cerebral feeling the category currently has, then the German’s may well have a sound argument to make in the age old ‘best Touring Car formula’ argument.

But at the moment, and having seen both live within the space of the week, I am very confident that what we enjoy in these parts of the world remains a global benchmark for this style of racing.

I just wish Supercars revved to 9,000 RPM too…