Marc Roca (38) is the DTM project manager at ABT Sportsline and the race engineer of Kelvin van der Linde’s ABT Audi R8 LMS GT3 evo II. Ahead of the first DTM race weekend of the year in Germany, at the Lausitzring (both races from 1 PM CEST live on ProSieben on Saturday and Sunday), the Catalan reveals how he ended up in the Allgäu region, his driver’s strengths and weaknesses and the close connection between racing and vehicle refinement at ABT Sportsline.
The DTM has a record grid this season. How impressive was it to see 29 cars going into the first corner at Portimão?
It was very impressive, especially with the sound of all these cars! You just hope your car is in one piece after the first corner …
How does a race engineer see the start of a DTM race? Do you have only eyes for your driver?
Exactly. We have around five screens in the corner of the pits where we are working. Your eyes are crossing all the time between different images. Where is your car? What are the gaps? Are we gaining some positions? This is very important on the first lap.
What is your primary job during the race?
We try to help the driver who is alone in the car. Is he trying to gain a position or just trying to maintain his gap? How is the pace of our driver compared to others. What can we achieve in terms of strategy? And we are informing him about things like track limits, if somebody has had a penalty or has already pitted. All of this knowledge is providing the driver with confidence and this is very important.
The DTM rules have changed a little bit from last season. How do you rate the changes after the first race weekend?
I think the rules are clearer, so there is less room for interpretation. This is helping both sides, the organization and also the teams. They did a good job, you can see that they want fair races. The fastest car should win.
You just said the fastest car should win. ABT Sportsline has three very competitive drivers. How do you work together with the other engineers and the other two drivers? In the end each of them wants to win …
It may sound as a cliché, but all three of them are really professional. We are sharing all of our ideas to extract the maximum performance. When the driver has competition within his own team, he can see the potential of the car and can improve and develop himself. At the moment, it is going really well. And you can see that we have people that are really committed and not there to play around.