Jens Marquardt credits BMW efforts on new format

The Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM) received a major shake up in the racing format for the first time in thirteen years, as a dual-race format was to be used for the first time since 2002.

It put all the manufacturers, teams and drivers under greater pressure to perform over a nine race weekend schedule, which BMW Motorsport Director, Jens Marquardt, felt that all his teams had “adjusted reasonably well.”

The former Toyota F1 team principal, who took over the helm at Munich from Dr. Mario Thiessen in 2012, explained to TouringCars.net on the Saturday (17th October) of the Hockenheim season finale, that there had been no situation during the year, where one of the eight M4 DTMs required a major rebuild.

“I think it was definitely different for the years before, but everybody adjusted reasonably well,” he said the night before BMW took the constructors’ crown by just seven points from Audi Sport in the final race of the year.

“I still feel sorry for Nurburgring, where Martin (Tomczyk) couldn’t take part in the first race, because we had an issue with his car and couldn’t resolve it in time.

“That was a very sorry moment for me, and I still feel really sorry for Martin. But I’m proud that he basically justified it on Sunday with a fantastic result during the race, scoring a single point, having started dead last. That was really typical Martin Tomczyk.”

He admitted that there have been a lot of discussions with rights holder ITR e.V, in terms of the schedule layout, which aims to assist the teams to not work under unreasonable conditions.

“I think we’ve done that reasonably from our side, but there is room for improvement on that point of view. But for a first season over a weekend with two races, we’ve not done too bad overall.

“Having spoken with my team principals, yeah, it took a bit to adjust, we’ve done it in a pretty good way.”