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HomeMotorsports“Coincidence has played its game": How Timo Glock's DTM comeback came about

“Coincidence has played its game”: How Timo Glock’s DTM comeback came about

How a family weekend at his parents’ house and his ex-champion engineer from GP2 led to Timo Glock sitting in the McLaren in the DTM in 2025

It was a big surprise when Timo Glock was announced as a DTM regular driver by the McLaren team Dörr Motorsport in December. But how did his DTM comeback come about after a three-year break? According to the 42-year-old from Odenwald, the course was already set in October at the season finale in Hockenheim on the starting grid.

Since there had already been talks for 2024, the ex-Formula 1 driver followed the team’s debut season. “Then chance played its game again, and I visited my parents with my daughter that weekend. And I only realized three days before that the DTM final was in Hockenheim,”

Glock’s parents live only about 80 kilometers from the Hockenheimring. “So I stopped by to see my friend Jochen Nerpel, was there for two hours and ran into my former race engineer Richard Selwin from GP2 on the grid.”

“Would you like to take the wheel again?”

As a reminder: the Briton Selwin was Glock’s race engineer at the iSport team in 2007 when Glock won the GP2 title. “We’ve always stayed in touch and kept saying we still have to do something together,” says Glock. “Then I say, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’

“I’m there for Rainer Dörr and I’m looking at the team in the background to see how they’re set up, because we might want to do something for this season,” Selwin replied. The connection is obvious: the Project 1 team was originally supposed to implement the McLaren deployment for Dörr in 2024, for which Selwin worked as an engineer in the WEC and also on the DTM project with the BMW.

But then the Project 1 team of ex-Glock manager Hans-Bernd Kamps slid into insolvency, which meant that Dörr Motorsport had to put a team together at short notice.

“He asked me: ‘Would you like to get behind the wheel again?’” Glock recalls the conversation with Selwin. ‘Want to? Of course! I already spoke to them last year.’

Master race engineer was ‘crucial’ for Glock

Glock then tried to find team boss Rainer Dörr on the grid, but to no avail. “I sent him a message two days later saying that if he wanted to talk again about working together, I was happy to have a chat. We did that and then things happened relatively quickly,” says Glock. “We were both clear about what we wanted – he about his plans and I about mine.”

Then, on November 27, the team organized a test day at Hockenheim at short notice so that the five-time DTM race winner could try out the McLaren 720S GT3 Evo and get a feel for it. “We made good use of the test day, and at the end he said, ‘We need someone with experience.’ And the clincher for me was that Richard Selwin is on board,” Glock describes the conversation. It didn’t take long to reach an agreement.

Why is the British race engineer an important pillar for Glock in his comeback? ‘The chemistry between him and me is just right,’ he says. “Richard and I spoke the same language from the very first moment, he understood my way of driving, he really threw himself into it,” he recalls of their time together in GP2 at iSport.

Why Glock didn’t drive for Dörr Motorsport as early as 2024

One event in particular has stuck in Glock’s mind to this day: he invited the iSport team to go karting. He did so with racing karts to give the team an understanding of his perspective as a racing driver. “They were totally open,” he says. “We think the same when it comes to what it takes to be successful. And that’s why he’s a key component for me,” argues Glock.

Why didn’t it work out for the ex-Formula 1 driver in the Dörr cockpit last year? “We had a conversation last year,” he recalls. “Then Rainer Dörr and his team were in a difficult situation because Project 1 was unable to field the team at short notice and Rainer had to organize it himself. As a result, the focus was elsewhere, and they tried to get the two cars to the start. So it didn’t work out.”

But the fact that it has now worked out has nothing to do with sponsors, emphasizes Glock. ‘No, that was basically not an issue, but of course I still try to use my contacts.’

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