Image: Group C Photography
“Yes, we want to win the championship.” With this announcement, Thomas Preining started the DTM season in Oschersleben at the end of May. 14 races later, the 25-year-old Porsche works driver from Linz will come to the season finale at the Hockenheimring tomorrow as the championship leader, where he could become the first Austrian to be crowned DTM champion. Ten points ahead of the Italo-Viennese Mirko Bortolotti (Lamborghini) is anything but a cushion. The last piece that Preining is still missing from the DTM puzzle will not be easy to get. Audi driver Ricardo Feller also still has a chance of winning the title in third place.
“You need luck or at least you can’t be unlucky” – that was at the top of the Linz native’s “title master plan” before his second DTM season. The championship wasn’t exactly a happy one for the driver of the Manthey EMA team’s legendary “Grello” Porsche (“Grello” stands for the green-yellow/green-yellow design). Controversial decisions by the race management (“yellow cards” with the return of a place after overtaking maneuvers, “penalty laps”, loss of victory after an alleged mistake by the pit crew) cost him possible podium places and thus valuable points. The fact that Preining still comes to the Hockenheimring as the leader is thanks to his fighting spirit and meticulousness that borders on doggedness. During the year, the 25-year-old constantly wrote down small details that needed to be improved in his “Preining List”. It was not uncommon for him to have one or two enlightening exchanges of ideas over the phone with his 28-year-old racing engineer Kai Störling in the dead of night. “Constantly questioning routines is the be-all and end-all,” says the German, who is impressed by Preining’s professional attitude. “The championship is his dream. He is ready to do everything for it.”
Good heart-brain set-up
Even if the son of the former motorcycle world championship driver Andreas Preining has become more mentally stable this year compared to his first DTM season and has found a good set-up between fighting heart and brain, he will be in the last place because of his supposed points cushion Don’t think about the two races of the season. “The attack mode remains active,” promises Preining, who describes the Hockenheimring as “one of my favorite tracks.” Even last year’s fatal season finale did not cool down the sympathy for this racetrack. In 2022, the Linz native scrapped his Porsche in a wild collision with David Schumacher in the fight for the title. The vehicle was rebuilt over months of detailed work and is now in the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. With this 911 GT3 R, Preining made history as the first Porsche race winner in the DTM before his crash at the Norisring.
At the weekend he could add another chapter to the motorsport history book if he actually manages to become the first Austrian to win the world’s most important touring car racing series.
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