The success of British drivers in the past 20 years of the DTM has been considerable. Gary Paffett, Jamie Green and Paul di Resta tallied a combined 51 wins, 41 poles and three titles between 2004 and 2019. In eight of those 16 seasons, one of the trio was either champion or runner-up. Paffett came close to adding to his brace of titles on four occasions, in 2010 finishing second to di Resta in a British 1-2.
But, for the past 12 months, the German category that morphed from a manufacturer-based touring car series into a GT3 championship for customer teams has had no British drivers whatsoever. Green’s contract wasn’t renewed by Audi and he dropped off the grid at the end of the final Class 1 season in 2020, with Esmee Hawkey the sole representative when the DTM rebooted in 2021. She lost her drive when the T3 Motorsport Lamborghini squad disappeared after last year’s Lausitzring round.
Now the unprecedented modern-era absence of a British driver from the DTM is ending with the arrival of sportscar rising star Jack Aitken at newly-aligned Ferrari outfit Emil Frey Racing. But his nationality is only one reason why the one-time Formula 1 race starter is arguably the most significant of the new 2023 intake, which includes his team-mate (and the son of Max Verstappen’s manager) Thierry Vermeulen.
“At that time DTM was probably one of the best things you could do outside of F1,” Aitken says when asked about that halcyon period for British participation. “I think it still is, but it’s a bit different now obviously.”
The fact he’s not doing the full DTM season and will prioritise a factory programme in a prototype over racing at Zandvoort is testament to that. Aitken will be on IMSA SportsCar Championship duty for Cadillac in the Watkins Glen 6 Hours, reprising his role as third driver for the Endurance Cup rounds. Victorious at Sebring with Action Express, his transatlantic programme for 2023 has seen him entered for the Spa World Endurance Championship round (although a fire in practice and Renger van der Zande’s race-ending shunt limited his mileage) and will include a crack at outright Le Mans glory next month.
It’s been a rapid rise for Aitken since he took the plunge into sportscars in 2021, despite suffering a broken collarbone and fractured vertebra in a serious Spa 24 Hours crash that interrupted his maiden season in GT World Challenge Europe with Emil Frey.
He continued in the GTWCE Endurance Cup last year and took a podium in the Barcelona finale, and combined it with a race-winning ADAC GT Masters programme alongside Albert Costa – the driver who will replace him at Zandvoort’s DTM meeting. But it was his impressive showings in a prototype, helping his TF Sport-run Racing Team Turkey outfit to secure the European Le Mans Series LMP2 Pro-Am title, that brought Aitken onto the horizons of Cadillac for his first sportscar factory gig.
Source: Autosport