ABT Sportsline has already experienced a lot in 23 years of DTM, but the situation before the finale of the 2022 season at the Hockenheimring (Saturday and Sunday both from 1 PM CEST live on ProSieben and ran.de) is unusual even for the team around Hans-Jürgen Abt and Thomas Biermaier. The top five drivers are only 16 points apart in the overall standings before the last two races – and they all drive different makes of car. In purely mathematical terms, there are even ten drivers who can still win the prestigious drivers’ title. The teams’ and manufacturers’ championships will also be decided at Hockenheim.
For Team ABT Sportsline there is already a small reason to celebrate when the first of the two final races starts at 1:30 PM CEST on Saturday: It will be the 300th DTM championship race that the team from Kempten will tackle. ABT Sportsline is the only DTM team that has been competing in the popular racing series without interruption for 23 years and has a correspondingly large number of supporters who will be keeping their fingers crossed for the team at Hockenheim – including high-ranking representatives of its 17 partners, who will all be represented at the season finale with their managing directors or top management by invitation of ABT Head of Sports Marketing Harry Unflath.
Not only Kempten and the Allgäu region will be rooting for Team ABT Sportsline this weekend: most of the spectators in the grandstands at the Motodrom will also be rooting for René Rast and his ABT Audi R8 LMS GT3 evo II with start number 33. Of the top five favourites, Rast is the only German driver and, as a three-time DTM Champion, undoubtedly the best known. In addition, numerous Audi employees from the nearby Neckarsulm factory are expected at the Hockenheimring, who wish for one thing above all: that René Rast becomes DTM champion for the fourth time on Sunday.
The 35-year-old from Minden, who lives in Bregenz, Austria, has another advantage: he is the only one of the top five favourites who already knows how to win the DTM in the final race at Hockenheim – he has already done so twice, both times to the chagrin of ABT Sportsline, by the way: in 2017, he snatched the title away from ABT driver Mattias Ekström virtually on the home straight by turning a 21-point deficit into a three-point lead and crowning his first full DTM season with the title straight away.
Having secured his second title early in 2019, Rast engaged in a fierce title fight with then ABT driver Nico Müller at the finale in Hockenheim in 2020 to mark the end of the Class 1 era. The Swiss won the first race on Saturday, but Rast then clinched his third DTM title with a victory on Sunday.
Rast also wrote a small piece of DTM history at the end of the 2018 season at Hockenheim: he managed to set a new record with six victories in a row. After a difficult start to the season for Audi, Rast almost managed to make the impossible possible with his two wins at Hockenheim and become champion once again. In the end, he was only four points short.
After a strong first season in the GT3 race car, Rast goes into the final weekend of 2022 just twelve points behind. A total of 58 points will still be awarded at Hockenheim.