– Until the last pit stop, everything looked like the perfect Oschersleben weekend for Thomas Preining: After pole and victory on Saturday, the “Grello” Porsche driver was on course for victory in Sunday’s race after another pole, before the usually so nimble Manthey crew needed 9.4 seconds for the pit stop due to a problem with the left rear wheel. Preining had to let winners Mirko Bortolotti and Maro Engel pass.
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“Of course, I would have liked to win the race, but I want to win them all,” Preining shrugs. “Overall, it was a great weekend for us. The car was perfect, the first two stops were the fastest. Mistakes like this can happen. It happens very rarely in our team.”
What the ex-DTM champion didn’t know at the time: Apparently, it wasn’t human error at all. “That wasn’t a direct mechanic error,” explains Patrick Arkenau, who acts as the race operations manager for the team, when asked by Motorsport-Total.com.
Instead, the locking system was jammed. “That happens once in 500 cases,” he reveals. “The fact that it happened during this particular pit stop is extremely annoying.”
“Mechanic noticed he couldn’t get to the nut properly”
But how did the breakdown happen in the first place? “Ultimately, with this car, the wheel nut locking system can get jammed with the wheel nut. Then it takes a relatively lot of force and momentum to push down the locking system to get to the nut,” explains Arkenau.
“The mechanic was already properly on the hub, but then noticed that he couldn’t get to the nut properly because the locking system was snagging.” It can also be seen in the TV images: The mechanic with the impact wrench had to try twice on the rear wheel before the nut came off.
“Then the flow is a bit off, but that’s a minor thing,” says Arkenau, who estimates the additional time loss at “two, three tenths,” while the entire problem cost around three seconds. “The big time loss was simply the jamming of the locking system.”
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Loss of three seconds robbed Preining of victory
Before the stop, Preining had a 1.3 and 2.2 second lead over Bortolotti and Engel. While Preining’s stop took 9.4 seconds, Bortolotti and Engel were serviced simultaneously in 7.4 and 6.8 seconds, which is why they overtook the Manthey Porsche in the pit lane.
“That’s a great shame and I’m very sorry for Tommy, who showed a magnificent performance in this race,” says Arkenau, who is also Preining’s race engineer. “But that’s part of the sport. We have also often benefited when something goes wrong with other teams.”
“Luckily it wasn’t a mechanic’s fault”
This time it hit Manthey, “but luckily it wasn’t a mistake by the team, by the mechanic. It was just bad luck,” the race operations manager clarifies. Despite everything, the “Grello” driver, who had struggled with the Balance of Performance at Norisring and threatened to retire, spoke of a “mega weekend.”
“We collected as many points as the rest of the year combined,” he refers to the 47 points, which increased his points tally to a total of 117 and now, as fourth in the overall standings, he is only 28 points behind DTM leader Maro Engel.
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“I hope we can continue to compete at the front,” says Preining, who doesn’t want to commit to whether he is now fully back in the title fight or not. “We’ll see.”
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