DTM 2021

[Matt K]

Originally Posted by Bcarr6

I wonder if the DTM needs to spend less of its budget on flying a helicopter around for some fairly unnecessary aerial footage and spend it instead on some on-screen AWS racer stats. Oh, wait, their biggest rival probably has a monopoly on that..

Having watched the races, I'm not ready to completely slate the series, but I hardly have a glowing review.

PROS

- The format. 50-60 mins of single driver head to head is nice

- The Competition. For the most part, the quality of the top 2/3 of the field is high, and the DTM could chisel itself out a niche for being PRO only, especially as the SRO Group move the opposite way towards giving AM's more of the cake.

- The Cars. Look, the on site advertising was pretty lacklustre, but the majority of cars have fairly substantial full car backing on board. This has always been a hallmark of the DTM. Its also hard to argue in my mind as a sportscar fan that GT3 is anything other than a brilliant class. Cons to follow on the cars...


CONS

- The cars. Let's just shut up about these being the fastest greatest GT3 cars in the world. They are GT3 cars, a very standised category, BOP moves things marginally forward from SRO maybe, but a quick google shows Kelvin van der Linde's 1'46.604 pole time for race two is more than a second slower than the 1'45.470 Henrique Chaves set in his Mclaren 720s GT3 in GT Open at Monza in 2020.

So, faster?? No.

This is a global spec used by many series, DTM's big headedness forces them to fluff up nonsense regualrly. But this should be seen as another completely standard GT3 series.

- The package. Firstly, this isnt any longer unique enough to warrant pay to view. Only the WEC and F1 can justify it, and theres stilla debate to be had for those as to whether it helps or hinders. For the DTM, the pay to view package is going to be a big drag on their figure. Why pay to see the same cars, go round the same track as you see in GTWC, GT Open, Italian GT for free. The overall production didnt warrant it either.

- The racing. others have said it more harshly, but there has always been some questionable occurrences in the DTM, maybe coincidental, but they happen enough to make you wonder.



Overall, while ill probably watch this series because I enjoy GT3's I wouldnt rank it anywhere as highly as GTWC or ADAC GT.

If we were to rank european GT3 series as it stands i'd put them as follows, which doesnt bode too well for the mighty (!) DTM.

Top Tier
GTWC / ADAC GT / British GT

Second Tier
GT Open / Italian GT / DTM



I think we now just have a few too many GT3 series in Europe. Ignoring the national series like British GT, ADAC, and Italian GT, there is 3 big GT3 series travelling Europe.

Looking at how average GT Opens grids are this year, itd almost make sense at this point to merge DTM and GT Open. A combo of the two would be worthwhile as an alternative to SRO formats, but we really dont need both neccessarily.

Agree with a lot of what you say here, however, your division of GT3 series into tiers is not really on for me. British GT being mostly a ProAm series can't be a top tier whereas DTM is a low tier. I'd definitely put DTM into your top tier while British GT into the low tier.
GTWC would definitely stay in the top one as this is 'World' championship although it's a typical endurance format (alongside sprint) which is not much of an interest for me - more of a teams competition than drivers and lots of names so that it's quite tough to follow it as one championship.
As for ADAC GT for now it's impossible to pick a winner in a ADAC vs DTM fight. This'll be felt in a few years' time maybe, next year the earliest I suppose.
DTM has a good grid and I'm definitely choosing this over ADAC GT but have to say the latter's grid is also strong (although with a bigger portion of amateurish/not really recognisable drivers), the whole package is good, we can see some efforts to widen its appeal like a new TV deal, these 'talk shows' on YouTube and so on and so forth.
DTM did well to preserve the championship but time will tell what it'll do to its identity and profile. I can't help but think that maybe the decision to switch to GT3 cars was a bit too quick but on the other hand the other option was to cancel the series. There are some ideas that look good on paper like going down the Supercars route or moving to GTE rules and I'd say both would be definitely better for DTM. But money is always a burden and few teams would be able to participate in GTE DTM (not many cars available as well) whereas adopting Supercars ruleset (or creating its own but somewhat similar) would take longer and who knows if anyone would be interested in that.
Berger capitalised on the fact that there are many teams already owning GT3 cars, many teams specialising in this type of racing and DTM is an alternative for some teams - possibly bigger marketability, still DTM's probably the most popular series in Germany (apart from F1) and has quite a following in Europe. So for some this was an opportunity to do something a bit different, sort of 'step up' maybe. But what makes me think is if there was a completely different ruleset for DTM - would there be a place for this championship? We live in a fast-changing world and motorsport's received a heavy blow in recent years and the scene is shrinking - no surprise there'll be championships disappearing in the years to come.
Last thought for now is that it's a huge shame there's a big rift between DTM and ADAC GT. They could join forces and create a quite a unique championship based on GT3 rules taking some things from one championship and others from the other. But this won't happen and there are a lot of obstacles that make it impossible.