Why Jack Aitken’s tire damage was foreshadowed on Sunday in Spielberg, what role the contact with Ricardo Feller played, and how difficult it will be to win the title
A horror weekend for Jack Aitken in Spielberg: After his blackout on Saturday, when he threw away second place three corners before the finish and crashed into the tire wall, the Emil Frey driver suffered a tire failure while lying in third place in Sunday’s race, meaning he once again failed to score any points, finishing 20th, and now lies 21 points behind sixth place ahead of the season finale.
But what was the cause of the mishap on lap three? “We had a touch on the first lap, but nothing serious – and it was on the other side of the car,” “So that can’t have been the cause.”
But the fact that the right rear tire was slowly losing pressure also points to another cause. “It was a small hole, like a hole in the tread, probably caused by debris or carbon—sometimes even gravel can cause something like that,” he says.
Did a loose bolt cause the problem?
He had already noticed two laps before the tire blowout that “the pressure was dropping. I was able to drive a little further,” he says. But “at some point, the pressure was so low that the tire just came off the rim.”
In fact, in the early stages of the race, there was debris on the track at the start-finish line and at the pit entrance, which almost prompted race director Sven Stoppe to send the safety car onto the track. However, he decided against it because there appeared to be no problems.
However, it is not certain whether the damage was caused by those parts at all. The damage to the tire suggested that a screw could have caused the problem. This could also be indicated by the statement made by Emil Frey’s technical director, Jürg Flach. He cites “an object on the start-finish straight in the first lap” as the cause.
Vermeulen suffered similar tire damage on Friday
It is interesting to note that his teammate Thierry Vermeulen also suffered very similar tire damage at the end of the first free practice session on Friday, when the tire initially lost pressure slowly and then forced him to return to the pits prematurely. In this case, too, it looked as if the damage could have been caused by a screw.
“Unfortunately, the safety car didn’t come out to bring us back into the field,” he explains, which is what he had been aiming for. “So it wasn’t our weekend.”
Aitken on a bitter weekend: “It’s tough”
Aitken, who was two points behind DTM leader Lucas Auer in the overall standings before Spielberg, only scored one point for third place on the grid at Spielberg and now has to make up 21 points – with 56 points still up for grabs. “We’ll go to Hockenheim and see what we can do,” Aitken shrugs. “It’s tough, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He takes hope from the fact that the 2025 season has already seen numerous twists and turns. “The whole season has been up and down. We’re going through a bad patch at the moment, so hopefully Hockenheim will play into our hands again.”