My First DTM Race at Oschersleben: P17 to P13, and 0.354s Short of P12

My first DTM race. Forty laps, zero cautions, and a fight for P12 that I lost by 0.354 seconds — which is exactly the width of one missed apex at the hairpin, three corners from the flag.

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New series, old-school circuit

After a season built almost entirely around the Porsche Cup, I wanted something different — and the iRacing DTM Series delivers exactly that. Modern DTM means GT3 machinery, so the grid is a genuine mixed bag: Ferrari 296, McLaren 720S EVO, Porsche 992 GT3 R, BMW M4 EVO, Lamborghini, Aston, Mustang, Corvette. And one Mercedes-AMG GT3. Mine. The only one in a 30-car field, which made spotting myself on the timing screen refreshingly easy.

Week 4 sent us to Motorsport Arena Oschersleben — 3.7 kilometers, 14 corners, no runoff worth mentioning and absolutely no interest in your excuses. It is a proper old-school German circuit: tight, rhythmic, and unforgiving of anything sloppy. Morning session, 19°C, high cloud. Perfect conditions for finding out exactly how much I did not know about a GT3 car.

Qualifying: P17 and a lesson in reference points

A 1:23.564 put me P17 out of 30. Not a disaster for a first outing in an unfamiliar car on an unfamiliar track, but the field was compressed enough that a few tenths were worth a lot of grid slots. Pole went to Kerem Torun with a 1:22.199 — about 1.3 seconds up the road, which at Oschersleben is a very long way.

This was split 2 of 5, SOF 2466. The top split ran a 4182 SOF, so there is plenty of headroom left to chase.

Forty laps, zero cautions, no breathing room

The first thing that hit me was how compressed everything stayed. This was not a race where the field strings out after five laps. For most of the distance I had under a second to the car ahead and under a second to the car behind — frequently closer to two tenths in both directions. Forty laps of that is a very specific kind of mental load.

My constant companion was the McLaren 720S GT3 EVO of Dmitriy Dikalenko. I got ahead of him off the line, he took the place straight back, and from there we were effectively tied together for the rest of the afternoon. The pit stop shuffled things briefly — I came out having gained a position, which felt like a decent piece of work at the time — and then it was right back to the same fight.

Fifty-six minutes of green flag racing with no safety car and no reset button. A Porsche Cup race is 25 minutes. This was 56, and the difference is not linear — it is a completely different discipline. At Oschersleben you never get a straight long enough to relax your hands. Every lap is fourteen corners of continuous input, and doing that for forty laps in a car I was still learning was easily the most physically demanding race of my season so far. The D-BOX platform and the Cubic belt tensioner do an excellent job of communicating exactly what the rear axle is doing — they also make sure you feel every single one of those forty laps in your forearms.

Attrition did its share of the work. Four cars failed to see the flag, including two from inside the top ten of the grid, and six drivers who started ahead of me finished behind. My own best lap came on lap 8: a 1:23.398, quicker than my qualifying effort and 0.982s off the fastest lap of the race. The pace was there. The consistency needed work — my race average of 1:25.414 ranked 13th, which is almost exactly where I finished. The numbers are annoyingly honest like that.

Three hundred and fifty-four thousandths

The last stint turned into a straight fight with Dmitriy Dikalenko in the McLaren for P12. Forty laps of racing and the gap at the flag was 0.354 seconds. One clean exit onto the main straight, one less wide moment through the final complex, and that position was mine.

Going into the final lap I had P12, and I had it comfortably. Then, three corners from the flag, the hairpin. I missed the apex, ran wide on the exit, and handed Dikalenko exactly the opening he had spent forty laps waiting for. He went through. I crossed the line 0.354 seconds behind him.

Forty laps without a meaningful mistake, and then one apex. That is the whole sport in a sentence.

Behind me, P14 was 6.8 seconds back, so the result was never in danger from the other direction. That is small comfort. Losing a position by three tenths after nearly an hour of racing is the kind of thing that keeps you awake usefully.

What the numbers say

P17 to P13, four positions gained, on the lead lap, no damage, no drama. Five incidents against a field average of 8.4 — not my cleanest run of the year, but respectable for a debut in a new car. iRating went 2186 to 2212, Safety Rating climbed from A 3.54 to A 3.71, and the championship account opened with 90 points in Division 3.

More importantly: I want to do this again immediately. The GT3 field is more varied, the racing is tighter, and Oschersleben is exactly the kind of circuit that rewards you for putting in the laps. Consider the DTM Series officially on the calendar. Next up, though, is a Porsche Cup round at Watkins Glen — which should be its own kind of fun.

One more thing: I am going to start streaming these live. No fixed schedule, purely when the mood strikes — so subscribing is the only reliable way to catch one.

The car: matte black, red hexagons, and one honest bumper

Since this was a debut in a car I had never raced, the AMG got the full treatment before it ever turned a wheel in anger. Jeremy Kerr built the design: a matte black base with a red hexagonal outline pattern that wraps bonnet, roof, flanks and rear deck, a red-and-white name banner across the windscreen, and the pgeppl.at branding along the sill.

The best detail is on the rear bumper, hand-lettered where every driver behind me would read it: "I’m just here for SR". Written as a joke. Delivered as a promise — Safety Rating went from A 3.54 to A 3.71 across those forty laps, in a race where the average driver collected 8.4 incidents. Sometimes the livery writes the race report for you.

One detail for the pedants, and I mean that affectionately: the renders below carry #64, the number the design was originally built around. At Oschersleben the car ran as #24 — which is what you will find in the results table further down.

🎨 Livery designed by Jeremy Kerr on Trading Paints.

Race stats

Series	iRacing DTM Series – 2026 Season 2, Week 4
Track	Motorsport Arena Oschersleben – Grand Prix
Car	Mercedes-AMG GT3 2020 – #24 (GT3 2025 class)
Start / Finish	P17 → P13
Qualifying	1:23.564 (P17 of 30)
Best lap	1:23.398 (lap 8)
Laps	40 (0 cautions)
Strength of Field	2466 (split 2 of 5)
Incidents	5x
iRating	2186 → 2212 (+26)
Safety Rating	A 3.54 → A 3.71

Full results

Pos	#	Driver	Start	Best Lap	Gap	Inc
1	5	Kerem Torun	P1	1:22.525	–	2
2	1	Tim Rupp	P3	1:22.417	+7.913	7
3	8	Romain Hetmann	P11	1:23.129	+15.277	4
4	30	Riyad Yousfi	P8	1:22.812	+15.676	7
5	6	Raimond Brakenhoff	P13	1:23.029	+18.641	1
6	28	Arnas G	P4	1:23.312	+19.468	4
7	9	Teo M Novak	P10	1:23.209	+25.071	10
8	18	Andy Aasheim	P5	1:23.037	+28.286	2
9	4	Kornel Manowski	P15	1:23.053	+30.518	6
10	2	Jonathan Leigh2	P19	1:23.389	+30.991	2
11	14	Dirk Stegemann	P28	1:23.371	+31.189	6
12	27	Dmitriy Dikalenko	P16	1:23.340	+32.097	4
13	24	Philipp Geppl	P17	1:23.398	+32.451	5
14	7	Kaya Eray Elderson	P20	1:23.340	+39.305	10
15	13	Jean Balthazar Ntagarurwa	P27	1:23.377	+39.447	8
16	15	Carlos Bravo Cano	P12	1:22.770	+39.901	12
17	11	Dmitry Davydov3	P21	1:23.244	+40.827	10
18	10	Tom Williams6	P18	1:23.481	+41.687	13
19	19	Hans Reuss	P22	1:23.286	+47.871	9
20	25	Mads Kraft	P14	1:23.468	+52.929	5
21	26	Nicholas Green6	P25	1:23.609	+60.518	14
22	17	Stephen Croft	P26	1:23.500	+67.462	8
23	29	Noah Haynes	P24	1:23.588	+74.197	7
24	12	Erik M Nixon	P30	1:23.916	+78.034	12
25	23	Michael van Driel	P9	1:22.965	+1 lap	19
26	22	Mikael Masse	P6	1:23.301	+1 lap	10
27	20	Daniel J Ryan	P23	1:24.334	DNF	9
28	21	Leo Pawelczyk	P29	1:23.963	DNF	22
29	3	Alex Stepanovskiy	P7	1:22.894	DNF	21
30	16	Artem Deulin	P2	–	DNF	2