Thierry reflects on DTM at Red Bull Ring: 'Difficult weekend'
Published on 26 September 2023 by Niels Hendrix
Verstappen.com Racing is represented in the DTM by Thierry Vermeulen, who drives a Ferrari 296 GT3 of Emil Frey Racing. The 21-year-old Dutchman made his appearance last weekend during the seventh round of the DTM championship, at the Red Bull Ring in Austria.
Thierry reflects: “The weekend at the Red Bull Ring is finished and overall it was a difficult weekend in my opinion. We had very high hopes, as we completed all the testing on Thursday and got all the information we needed. We seemed to be quite competitive and both my teammate Jack (Aitken) and I liked the balance of the car. We started the weekend with a positive feeling. A bit of mixed weather conditions on Friday changed the run plan, but we still had a positive feeling at the end of the day on Friday.”
“It went a bit downhill on Saturday with a wet qualifying, as the car wasn’t really working how we expected it. I struggled a bit myself as well, so we started a bit further down. P16 for me but we thought the race would be dry and we had high hopes for the race. But sadly it wasn’t the case and for me it was a very tough race: battling a couple of times at the beginning and struggling with the pace.”
Thierry continues: “After we finally managed to switch to the slicks, we had some good hopes for the second part of the race in the dry conditions but I got taken out one lap after the pitstop. That was very frustrating for me to have a DNF due to collision after all the hard work towards the race. But it’s part of racing, so we moved on to Sunday.”
“On Sunday we had a dry day so we took a bit of risk in qualifying shooting two new sets of tyres, but unfortunately it didn’t pay off. We expected a really good qualifying, but ended up only in P12. We had a good start, so it seemed more positive and then I got stuck behind Jack and I wasn’t able to overtake. So in the end I came home in P9, which is still a good result but I’d expected a bit more. So some points, P15 in the championship at the moment and hopefully we can get some good points in the final round of DTM in Hockenheim.”
Thierry concludes: “But first we return to Zandvoort, my home track, so time for some revenge. I am looking forward to the GT World Challenge there. But first I have some time to train and prepare myself for this event.”
