Opinion: Why the DTM is Dying?

Mercedes left in 2018, Aston Martin in 2019 and Audi will leave at the end of 2020. The death of the DTM, Germany’s premier touring car championship is almost certainly on the horizon.

In the last ten years, the championship’s status and prestige has been dwindling and it looks like the series has hit breaking point with BMW the only manufacturer left.

Similarly to the World Endurance Championship’s LMP1 class, the reliance on manufacturers and regulations that are unsustainable might just have killed the DTM as we know it.

Audi say their departure from the DTM was because of the coronavirus outbreak but there was already talk of the German manufacturer pulling out. COVID-19 has simply sped up the process.

The DTM will utilise hybrid powertrains from 2022 and this was meant to provide stability to the championship, it has not and even before the new regulations have been seen on track – it looks like it has not worked and it not a good enough of an incentive for new manufacturers or teams.

In a way, it is a remarkably similar position to the Australia Supercars Championship with Holden pulling out at the end of 2021 and the future of the sport still up in the air with the next set of regulations still not finalised.

Gerhard Berger became chairman of the DTM in 2017 and unfortunately he has done the series more harm than good.

The former Formula One driver has been outspoken about not accepting electric motorsport series such as Formula E, kept a narrow mind over the future of the DTM, not listened to the manufacturers and this strategy is now being unveiled as the series will seriously struggle to recover from this situation.

DTM has had a lot of time to merge with Japan’s Super GT category ever since they moved the new ‘Class One’ rules and it was only last year when we saw something happen with a non-championship race in Fuji, by then the Japanese manufactures had enough and now do not want to race in Europe.

When people talk about laying out a plan in motorsport, they say that because if you do not then manufacturers will lose interest. The DTM needed to announce plans earlier or should have made the series much cheaper and shifted to a customer team model.

Drivers such as DTM veteran Mattias Ekstrom and Edoardo Mortara have said the DTM cannot survive in its current format and they are absolutely right.

Audiences have dwindled, it is no longer an attractive motorsport series and it has not evolved.

Remember, the DTM used to be very popular across Europe but in the last decade, compared to the likes of the British Touring Car Championship, it has got things badly wrong.

Where do they go from here? TCR? The ADAC TCR Championship already exists in Germany. GT3? The ADAC GT Masters Championship.

All of DTM’s DNA of quality drivers and cars that were touring car’s version of F1 has gone. How do they get back to that level of entertainment and quality? It seems like an impossible task now and the DTM as we know it is inevitably going to die.

Ultimately the expensiveness, the lack of international status and most importantly the reliance on just a few manufacturers has finally caught up on them.