A positive end to a difficult time for Tutumlu in Spielberg

The Red Bull Ring, regarded as less favorable for the Audi R8 LMS cars, proved to be a challenge for Tutumlu. The Barcelona-born driver was just under two tenths of a second slower than Car Collection Motorsport teammate van der Linde, crowned champion in the ADAC GT Masters two years ago. They were 5th Audi classified on Sunday.

Isaac Tutumlu has concluded toughest weekend throughout the 2016 season in the ADAC GT Masters at the Red Bull Ring. Spielberg requires torque and top speed and the Audi R8 LMS struggles in such conditions. In addition, Tutumlu, sharing the Car Collection Motorsport-entered GT3 racer with South-Africa´s Kelvin van der Linde, was facing another unknown track, which added another dimension of difficulty.

After Friday´s free practice sessions, when Audi cars struggled for outright pace, Car Collection Motorsport suffered an engine failure on Saturday morning. It forced to swap engines ahead of race 1. But as it took five hours to install the new one, the car shared by Tutumlu and van der Linde only completed a few shakedown laps at the end of the race. On Sunday morning, van der Linde qualified 30th on the starting grid as he was forced to abort his best flying laps due to red flags. Later in the race, the duo of Car Collection Motorsport put it a good recovery drive to finish 16th overall and 5th among Audi-built cars.

“It was not easier than expected. We knew our top speed would struggle in comparison with Bentleys or Chevrolets. As if this weren´t enough, we had an engine failure. Our team worked to solve it but the ADAC GT Masters is an extremely competitive racing series, in my opinion even more difficult than the DTM of F1. So, Kelvin couldn´t improve 30th on the grid due to red flags”, Tutumlu explained. He underlined “despite we lost some positions in the pit-stop, I had a close battle with drivers such as Markus Pommer or Florian Scholze and my personal fastest lap was just two tenths slower than Kelvin´s one on old tires. At least, we finished 5th among Audi cars. Taking into consideration all our problems, it was a good result. Nürburgring will be much better in two weeks´ time. I´m sure!”.