Rene Rast won Saturday's DTM race at the Norisring to secure his third victory this season and the 13^th in total in his DTM career. At the start, the 2017 DTM Champion had to restart his engine and dropped to the last position. When a safety car period became apparent, his team called Rast in to pit for a tyre change after just three laps. Shortly afterwards, he had overtaken all competitors and went on to finish the race with an advantage of nearly 35 seconds.

"That was a crazy race," said Rast. "Obviously, we were somewhat lucky with the safety car. But we were very fast today and would have been in contention at the front of the field anyhow. I just need to practice starting some more. I released the clutch too quickly and stalled the engine. We also have to do better in qualifying tomorrow."

Rast had to settle for starting third on the grid after having gotten stuck in traffic on the second set of tyres, whereas Nico Muller from Audi Sport Team Abt Sportsline secured the three additional points for pole position. His time of 46.3 seconds is the fastest that has ever been driven on the current track configuration, clearly showing the performance capability of the new Class 1 race cars and the new Audi RS 5 DTM powered by a more than 610bhp two-litre four-cylinder turbo engine.

For Audi, this was the sixth DTM victory in total at the Norisring. Most recently, in 2016, Nico Muller had won Audi's home round at the Norisring. "Unfortunately, we've traditionally struggled quite a bit in front of our fans and employees," said Head of Audi Motorsport Dieter Gass. "We were hoping that this would change with the new Audi RS 5 DTM. Rene was incredibly fast today. In spite of his early pit stop, in the end, he consistently drove fast times on the old tyres."