Emil Frey Ferrari driver Jack Aitken led the opening race at Sachsenring from start to finish to claim his third victory of the 2024 DTM season.
Having inherited pole position as a result of Thomas Preining’s five-place grid penalty, 28-year-old Aitken had no trouble fending off his rivals as he took the chequered flag with a winning margin of 1.8s.
Factory Lamborghini driver Mirko Bortolotti finished second for SSR Performance to snatch the lead of the championship from Abt Audi driver Kelvin van der Linde, while Winward Mercedes’ Maro Engel completed the podium spots in third to boost his own title hopes.
At the start of the race, Aitken moved to the left to cover off fellow front-row starter Bortolotti, while HRT driver Luca Stolz maintained third in the best of the Mercedes cars.
Further behind, Engel jumped Stolz’s team-mate Arjun Maini to grab fourth position, while van der Linde rose from 10th to seventh on the opening lap to limit the damage from his poor qualifying performance.
Meanwhile, Aitken steadily extended his lead over Bortolotti, extending his lead to two seconds in just nine laps. By the time the pit window opened after 20 minutes of racing, the British driver had built a buffer of over four seconds, such was his pace in the Ferrari 296 GT3.
Bortolotti tried to undercut Aitken by heading into the pitlane relatively early on lap 16, forcing the latter to cover him on the next tour. Emil Frey was also slow with the front tyre change, costing him up to two seconds.
But such was the advantage that Aitken had built in the first stint that he still managed to return to the track with his lead intact, albeit with Bortolotti breathing down his neck with his tyres already up to temperature.
Ultimately, Aitken was able to pull away from Bortolotti again and cruise to a fourth win of his DTM career and establish himself as an outside contender for the championship.
Mirko Bortolotti, SSR Performance Lamborghini Huracán EVO GT3
Photo by: Alexander Trienitz
Bortolotti was classified a distant second, but with van der Linde languishing down in eighth place, the result was enough for him to wrest back the control of the championship by six points.
Third place in the race went to Engel, who had overtaken Mercedes stablemate Stolz for the final spot on the podium with a brilliant pass around the outside of Turn 2 on lap 12.
Maini claimed fifth place behind team-mate Stolz, as Mercedes secured three cars inside the top five.
Meanwhile, reigning DTM champion Thomas Preining scored a solid sixth-place finish after coming on top in a long and fierce duel with van der Linde, passing the Audi driver into Turn 1 on lap 35.
Van der Linde was also overtaken towards the end of the race by the top Schubert BMW of Rene Rast, who completed an incredible recovery from the back of the grid to take seventh place.
Rast, who also carried a five-place grid penalty for racking up three reprimands, was already up to 13th place at the start and ran deep in the first stint, leaving his pitstop until lap 28.
With fresher tyres for the final part of the race, he was even able to close in on Preining, but eventually settled for seventh place.
Rast’s team-mate Sheldon van der Linde was ninth at the finish, just behind his brother Kelvin, after the two battled for position in the final laps of the race.
DTM debutant Jordan Pepper completed the top 10 for Grasser Lamborghini as he substituted for the injured Christian Engelhart, beating the second Emil Frey Ferrari of Thierry Vermeulen and the last remaining Mercedes of Lucas Auer.
Marco Wittmann damaged the front-left panels of his BMW in a first-lap incident with Luca Engstler, contributing to his tough run to 13th place. The final points-paying positions went to SSR Performance driver Nicki Thiim and Paul Motorsport’s Maximilian Paul.
