The first weekend of May sees the return of DTM. Germany's touring car series has been given a rejig for 2015, with each of its nine race weekends boasting two races rather than one, extra action intended to perk up spectator numbers.
Also hoping for improvement are Mercedes and Paul Di Resta. The Scot's return to DTM from Formula 1 coincided with an uncompetitive season for his team, and a 15th place finish in the drivers' standings was well off the pace of his title-winning 2010 campaign.
"It was harder coming back to DTM than it was switching from it," Di Resta told TG ahead of final preparations for the Hockenheim opener on May 2nd.
"We had to play catch up," he said, referring to his V8-powered C-Class racer being a second per lap off the pace of its BMW and Audi rivals at the beginning of the 2014 season. "But Mercedes is the most successful team in DTM and I can pretty much guarantee we'll be back. Being a bit more mature, and not daft and young, I accept you have to go through the waves of motorsport", he said.
Those waves of motorsport took him from winning the DTM to being in F1's mid table, and it's impossible not to ask how life in the two sports has compared.
"Your mindset is different. DTM's an ultra competitive championship," said Di Resta. "If you make a small mistake in qualifying it's going to cost you three or four rows on the grid. It's not a case of if you're in the best car, with the best manufacturer, you can go out give it a balls-out lap and in the worst case qualify second on the grid."
DTM cars vary in all but shape to their road car ‘relations', and as such are often thought more of as saloon-bodied single-seater prototypes than traditional touring cars. Di Resta assured us they're still quite a different beast to drive than an F1 car, though.
"The car's very fun to drive, and requires a bit of finesse as well. It's a heavier car, your centre of gravity is different, your position in the car is quite a bit different. The way the car moves about, too: you get a different sense of what's happening on the rear axle to the front axle, and it's about finding that balance of what you're comfortable with."
Plenty of F1 influences are present in DTM, with DRS and soft and hard option tyres introduced in 2013 to inject more overtaking into the sport. For 2015, the former has been tweaked - requiring a 1sec rather than 2sec gap to the car in front to activate - while the latter has been dropped for one single Hankook tyre, to the chagrin of drivers including Di Resta.
"We quite like the double option, it brings another equation and another compromise in setup and how your race is going to pan out. We want it to be difficult because you want to be able to have an edge over competitors. We'll push for the option tyre next year.
"The races people love are the races where something goes wrong, and it all falls apart for certain people," said Di Resta, referring to the fallout of soft tyre degradation. "And let's see the cars sliding about a bit!"
Di Resta would also like to see a return to a British DTM round. Three of its nine weekends in 2015 will be held outside of Germany, but the series hasn't visited UK shores since 2013.
And Di Resta reckons it's far and away the race series to rattle F1's cage. "I'm not saying F1 is missing something, but people's mindset is changing away from it. People want noisy cars, they want to see close racing. We're entertainers, it's not traditional sport. I think DTM is the second best series in the world by a long way."
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