A successful weekend for Liam Lawson in Assen for round 6 of the DTM championship bagging two podium finishes making it four top three finishes in as many races.
Previously, Lawson was down 59 points from the championship lead and is now ahead by 10 points after a 3rd place finish in race 1 and a 2nd place finish in race 2.
The second race was not as eventful as the first but an early pit stop strategy accelerated the Kiwi into a prime spot for the latter part of the race.
As the lights went green with the cars starting from a rolling start Lawson dropped to 4th after being pushed wide by Wittman after trying a move down the inside of turn 3 leaving the door open for Albon who inherited 3rd.
With no further race incidents the drivers remained the same until lap 5 when the leader, Lucas Auer, entered the pits with Liam Lawson following. The AF Corse team cracked out a great 7.38 second stop to help close the gap to the race leader.
Lawson had clean air on track exiting pit lane and had a fantastic out lap heating up his fresh tyres while Wittman in 1st and Albon in 2nd pitted at the end of lap 6.
When the pair of Wittman and Albon exited the pits, Lawson came flying by with his tyres up to temperature ahead of Albon and on the inside of Wittmann pushing him up to net 2nd and 10th on track.
Into lap 19 Lawson was running a quiet race trying to break down the gap to the net leader Lucas Auer who was ahead of Lawson by 1.7 seconds, gradually breaking it down by a few tenths each lap.
With 10 minutes left Lawson raked the gap back to 1.1 seconds but the ballast started to play a harsher role than earlier in the race with Auer increasing his pace.
But Lawson was not going down without a fight and into the final 5 minutes the gap had decreased to under a second (0.98s). Lawson wasn’t giving up just yet.
2 laps to go and Lawson was hunting down the back bumper of Auer with a gap of 0.3s, the two drivers were bumper to bumper around some bends with the Mercedes having outright pace on the straights.
But the team were not willing for Lawson to take any unnecessary risks and he crossed the line a well deserved second place, only half a second down on Auer.
Here are how the top 20 drivers finished:
Post race interview:
You were fighting really hard out there, trying to get closer to Lucas but you didn’t want to risk it as the new championship leader?:
“I was being told don’t take any risks, don’t take any risks! To be completely honest, I was absolutely flat-out lap after lap to try and catch Auer. Congrats to him and his whole team they didn’t put a foot wrong today.”
“Great to take over the lead of the championship and a good points haul for the team this weekend. We’re hoping now to focus on keeping this up for the last 2 rounds.”
You have a 10 point lead now, but we all know how quickly that can change. Are you looking forward to Hockenheimring next round?
“Hopefully we can do more of this, it’s another track that should be ok for our car. Everyone should be pretty close due to that being an official test track preseason so, we all have experience there.”
Featured image source: twitter.com/liamlawson30