Courtesy of Autosport
By Glenn Freeman Thursday, June 4th 2009, 10:45 GMT
Mattias Ekstrom leads Paul Di Resta at LausitzAudi's head of motorsport Wolfgang Ullrich has admitted that the manufacturer was not surprised to see Mercedes back on form in the DTM race at Lausitz last weekend.
Gary Paffett led a comfortable Mercedes 1-2 in the second round of the championship, just two weeks after Audi had locked out the top four positions in the season opener at Hockenheim.
However, Ullrich said that Audi had been surprised by Mercedes' lack of speed in the first race, rather than its impressive pace second time out.
"At Hockenheim we didn't see the true performance," he said. "I was surprised at that result, things did not go together for [Mercedes] there.
"But I didn't fool myself into thinking that they were that far behind. We knew that the cars would be close together here, so I was not surprised with what happened in the race."
Reigning champion Timo Scheider, who could only manage fifth in the race, agreed with the Audi boss.
"We knew it would be tough," said the German. "We knew that the performance gap at Hockenheim was not as bad as everybody thought.
"But in the end it's still disappointing. We were 10 kilos heavier, which was difficult, but we didn't have the performance that we thought we'd have."
