Sixth again for Jamie

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Jamie Green kept his DTM points tally ticking over with a solid sixth-place finish at Norisring.

While it wasn’t the result he was hoping for going into the race, his fourth points finish in five races has taken him to seventh in the standings and still within sight of the points leader.

“My aim this season was to score points in every race,” said Jamie. “Obviously I would prefer to have had four wins rather than four sixths, but it’s good that we’ve got the consistency and just one win would put me right in the championship hunt.”

In difficult wet qualifying conditions, Jamie grabbed sixth place on the grid. He made a reasonable getaway, but got boxed in on the run into the tight hairpin first corner.

“Ekstrom was on the outside of me and Abt came down the inside and I had nowhere to go,” he explained. “I tapped the back of someone, I think it was Scheider, and lost a couple of places on the run out of the corner. So I came around lap one in P9.”

Jamie’s Mercedes-Benz team called him in early for the first of his two mandatory pit stops and this worked in his favour as he was able to show his pace on a clear track. His second stop came right after a mid-race safety car period. New DTM rules means cars can no longer pit when the safety car is on track. This meant there was a pack of cars that had only stopped once for Jamie to battle with after his second stop.

“There weren’t any blue flags so even though some of the cars I was coming up to were a lap down I still had to pass them like we were racing for position,” he said.

In the closing stages he chased down the fifth-place car of Tom Kristensen. Jamie was clearly quicker than the Audi, but ran out of laps in the end.

“I caught right on the last lap. It’s very easy to make a mistake here and lock up and crash into someone. It would have been a kamikaze effort, so I decided to stick with what I had.”

Given that he’d been feeling under the weather with a virus for the whole weekend, it was an acceptable result.

Next up the series heads to Italy and Mugello. The track is best known as a MotoGP venue and it will be the first DTM race there in a decade. But Jamie does have some experience of the track, having tested there for Mercedes in early 2005.

“After being at two tracks with sub-50 second laps, it’s good to be back at a proper drivers’ circuit,” he said. “You can never really know whether it’s a track that will suit us or not until you get there, but Mercedes has made a lot of progress with the 2007 car.”