1991 DTM

[Andrew Abbott]

I'm researching the 1991 DTM season and have some questions that perhaps people on here can help with. I've already used the 'Tourenwagen Story '91' book and Frank de Jong's (RIP) excellent website, but haven't been able to dig deeper on some of the other issues.

In particular I'm a bit confused as to how the qualifying system worked. It seems that from the fourth event onwards it was a timed qualifying session first, with the drivers from 17th onwards having to duke it out in a qualifying race.

But how the drivers who went into that qualifying race were decided is eluding me a bit for the first three events. Frank's website says that "Grid positions 1-16 decided in split qualifying (even/odd numbers, grid in order of results per group)" but I'm not completely clear on this. What does that mean?

If we take Frank Biela, for example, who won the qualifying race at the second event at Hockenheimring, his qualifying time was 2:15.31 - which was faster than Frank Jelinski, who according to 'Tourenwagen Story '91' didn't have to go into the qualifying race... but Frank did.

Any further interesting discussion on the 1991 DTM is welcomed. Further kudos if you can point me in the direction of other reliable sources.