An incredible parallel involving Rene Rast: How the Spitzkehre in Hockenheim cost him the title in a similar way 19 years ago and what exactly happened in the Seat Cup
Will the hairpin turn in Hockenheim be Rene Rast’s fateful corner? The Schubert BMW driver, who three weeks ago at the DTM finale in Hockenheim was the victim of a chain reaction at this spot in the first lap and lost a possible fourth title, had already experienced drama in the bottleneck earlier in his career. And there, too, the incident cost him the title.
“Such setbacks, such low blows, are not the first to happen in my career. Back in 2006, we lost the Seat Cup title in this very corner,” Rast explains. “In the last race, I was also taken out of the fight.”
But what happened back then? Rast, who was fighting for his career in the Volkswagen one-make cups after leaving formula racing, started the final race on a drying track as the championship leader from the front row.
How the chaos in the hairpin turn cost Rast the title in 2006
But then, as in the 2025 DTM finale in Hockenheim, everything went wrong in the first lap: Rast was hit in the hairpin by defending champion Thomas Marschall, who in turn had collided with Czech driver Erik Janis. For the disappointed Rast, the race was over because his car was too badly damaged.
The race organizers determined that Janis was responsible for the crash, and he was subsequently penalized. The beneficiary was Florian Gruber, who had started the race in third place in the championship and only needed a sixth-place finish to secure the title. Rast, who had won a total of three races that season, ultimately missed out on the title by three points, finishing in second place.
After the setback, Rast got his start in Porsche
In 2007, Rast, who was already working with manager Dennis Rostek at the time, switched to the Porsche Carrera Cup Germany, and in 2008 he won the title in the prestigious Porsche one-make cup. However, it was in the Porsche Supercup that the Minden native made a name for himself from 2010 to 2012 with three titles – even though the DTM was still a long way off for him and he had to digest further setbacks.
Rast speaks of “setbacks, like all those DTM trials that we were never allowed to complete successfully and where we never got a cockpit.” This is because Rast was not initially recognized as a talent by either BMW or Audi in their search for drivers for the DTM squad, before he made his DTM debut at Zandvoort in 2016 at short notice due to Adrien Tambay’s injury.
In 2017, he won his first DTM title in his rookie season with Audi – the rest is history.
