Dtm

[John]

Alan,

I was going to address two concerns:

1) that the BTCC becomes a breeding gound for drivers and teams who then graduate to WTCC leaving the BTCC behind. Meaning we were left with little more than a feeder championship taking our best drivers and teams to higher things (like Thommo has done this year)

But I read with interest your response to the WTCC thread below and am encouraged by your views.

2) the other concern relates to the DTM. This championship has only three manufacturers and relatively few competitive cars (bearing in mind year old cars can rarely compete at the same level) and may soon have only two when Opel leave next season. However what they do have is an unbelievable pool of drivers. There's a multiple DTM champ in Schneider, ex champs in Aeillo and Biela (also BTCC champs), ex F1 stars like Frentzen and Alesi (and possibly Hakkinen next year?) to name just a few - and attendances and TV audiences are very good.

I know this is even more remoter than WTCC in that the cars are completely different and its effectively a national championship (although a significant number of races are outside Germany), but I would be interested in your views on the relationship between DTM and BTCC and whether you see it as positive, negative or indifferent. I'd also be interested to hear any views on the differences in the line ups. No disrespect to some of the guys in BTCC but with the obvious exceptions they don't have the same pulling power as the DTM guys. Given the chance would you like to have the so called superstars? and if so what kind of things might attract them to GB?

Cheers!

Keep up the good work and hope to see some good announcements over the winter.

John

[Alan Gow]

The virtues that you pointed out, regarding the DTM, are also it's problem.

To get "name" drivers like, use the technology they use in their cars and to spend the huge amount of money they do in giving away literally hundreds of thousands of free tickets during the season and etc., costs a lot of money.

The DTM budgets, compared to BTCC or WTCC are stratospheric....which is why it always seems to go through the same problems every few years of "boom and bust".

The DTM has consistently proven to be unsustainable with the costs involved...and it's staring the exact same problem (yet again) of manufacturers either pulling-out or simply not interested and the series going through yet another problem period.

The short answer to your question is that, unlike the WTCC, the DTM has absolutely no relevance to the BTCC. If the cost of getting big-name drivers means that the series will suffer as a result of the huge increases in budgets, then it's a factor we can well do without for the long-term health and growth of our championship.