During his second pit stop, Maro Engel was blocked—of all people—by his sister team: How this costly misunderstanding occurred and what AMG has to say about it
Frustration for Mercedes-AMG title contender Maro Engel after finishing seventh in Sunday’s DTM race at the Norisring (race report): Just as the Winward driver was about to pull away after his second mandatory pit stop, his brand colleague Tom Kalender—whose Landgraf team had a pit directly in front of Winward’s—drove in, thereby blocking the track.
“I was able to make up a lot of positions on the rain tires and slowly work my way up, but then, unfortunately, there was that mishap during the pit stop,” says Engel, who had already moved up to seventh place after starting from twelfth, “That’s when the sister team came in. We’d actually agreed that wouldn’t happen. We’ll have to analyze that afterward.”
What made it especially bitter: Engel was served lightning-fast by his mechanics in 6.8 seconds, but then had to wait about three seconds, as he would otherwise have risked an unsafe release penalty. “Stop, stop, stop—go behind Kalender,” race engineer Mauricio Moreira shouted over the radio.
Why Kalender’s stop “slipped” into Engel’s lap
The lollipop man first held the sign in front of his car, but Engel started moving anyway. Then he held it up in front of the windshield again—and the Winward Mercedes driver reacted in time to avoid a penalty. “I think my team and I did everything right,” says Engel, who ultimately finished in seventh place, exonerating his team.
But how did this unfortunate incident happen in the first place? And what does Engel mean when he says the events weren’t “planned”? “Bottom line, it was a misunderstanding,” explains Thomas Jäger, who serves as Sporting Director of the DTM division at Mercedes-AMG, “Tom was actually supposed to come in at the end of lap 40 because he was a bit further back.”
AMG calls for action: “We need to synchronize this better”
The second pit stop window opened just as the leaders had already passed the pit entrance, but Kalender—who was in 13th place—had not yet done so. According to Jäger, the young driver’s stop was “actually scheduled, but then the engineer thought it was a bit too tight—and he didn’t want to risk the pit stop window not being open yet.”
As a result, the Landgraf-Mercedes driver’s pit stop “slipped into the next lap,” during which Engel’s stop was also scheduled. With so little time left, there was no way to prevent both drivers from coming in at the same time and one of them getting blocked in the narrow Norisring pit lane.
“Because the lap here is so short, everyone was focused on the pit stop—and unfortunately, they forgot to say, ‘Hey, we have to keep either Maro or Tom out there now.’” According to Jäger, there had already been a discussion in which it was made clear “that we need to synchronize this better so that we don’t get in each other’s way.”
How many positions did the mishap cost Engel?
After all, “especially when the field is bunched up really tight, that can cost you a lot of positions,” Jäger notes. But how did the incident affect Engel’s race? “I don’t know how much it cost me—maybe two positions,” says the Monaco-based driver, who is in second place in the overall standings at the halfway point, nine points behind winner Nicki Thiim. “But that’s the nature of the sport: dust yourself off and keep going!”
And what does Jäger think? “Maro was seventh before and after. He may have been robbed of the chance to move up.” Because after the pit stop, three to five seconds ahead of Engel was a group consisting of Arjun Maini, Jules Gounon, and Thierry Vermeulen, who were in fourth through sixth place. And Engel’s strong outlaps are well known. So he might have had a chance to break into the top 5.