After the disastrous weekend at the DTM season opener at Hockenheim Susie Stoddart was aiming for improvement just one week later on round 2 at Oschersleben.

But after experiencing two days of practice without any technical problems on her TV Spielfilm AMG Mercedes C Class she was quite disappointed after qualifying. “My car was good, and it was encouraging that I was a lot closer to my team mates pace than I was before”, the 25 year old Scot said. “For sure it was disappointing to end up 18th as just one tenth of a second would have put me one row forward. But that’s what DTM is. I just made a small mistake in the first sector and that’s where I lost the tenth. But after the good long runs in practice I know we are going to have a strong car over the race distance. My Persson team once again did a fantastic job in practice so I am quite optimistic for tomorrow.”

The optimism turned out to be a little manque on race Sunday in front of 64.000 spectators. In the first two laps she had some contact with another car which caused damage to the front of her car: “I damaged the front aero and we have to check whether my underfloor was broken, too. Anyway, from that moment on I had to deal with big understeer and also bent steering which both compromised my race pace quite a lot. But still we managed to finish 14th on a race track that isn’t one of my strongest. That’s the positive point so now we just have to keep going in the same direction for the rest of the season.”

Susie is now looking forward to the next race at the beautiful Italian track at Mugello: “We have seen that the 2007 Audis are very strong over one qualifying lap but we can keep their pace quite well over a race distance. In Oschersleben we had eight Mercedes cars in the top 14 positions, so that should be encouraging enough for us to keep up fighting!”