How frustrating the 2024 season was for former champion Rene Rast, what he is demanding after the catastrophic qualifying record and whether he wants to stay in the DTM
In the Class 1 DTM, Rene Rast drove from title to title in an Audi, but this year the BMW works driver found himself at the back of the field several times on the starting grid. “It was my most difficult season,” says the three-time champion, who only started from the top 10 in four of 16 races and yet still finished fourth in the championship with two wins.
“We need to understand whether we need a different adjustment for next year, because it makes no sense for us to always start from 15th or 20th place and then fly through the field,” says Rast, calling for consequences due to the qualifying weakness, which also affected his team-mates Sheldon van der Linde and Marco Wittmann, and alludes to the balance of performance.
He says that his Schubert team have left no stone unturned in their quest to find a solution with the BMW M4 GT3 throughout the season. “We have tried a lot of things – and we haven’t forgotten how to drive or how to set up the car,” he says. “So I don’t think there was much else we could have done, apart from try everything. And nothing really worked in qualifying.”
“Extremely frustrating for the whole team”
After a test at the Nürburgring on July 16, Schubert was already confident that he had found a solution for getting the unheated tires up to temperature, but the qualifying results in the second half of the season also left something to be desired. Apart from Rast’s third place in Spielberg, where he benefited from Maro Engel’s slipstream, according to his own statements. In fact, he started from the back of the grid three times in total – something that had never happened before.
“I believe we have extremely high quality in the team,” said Rast, also pointing out that Schubert is the only team in the DTM field to field three DTM champions. ”And yet we are not even close to being competitive, which is of course extremely frustrating for the whole team.”
On top of that, Rast repeatedly had to fight his way through the field due to poor qualifying positions – and was regularly involved in collisions. This resulted in penalties and criticism, with Thierry Vermeulen and Jordan Pepper even giving him the finger at Oschersleben and the Sachsenring. How does he deal with the criticism?
Rast on criticism due to crashes: “I don’t read comments”
“It’s not the first time I’ve been in this kind of situation,” says Rast, who is not discouraged. “I know what I did. I’ve analyzed it and drawn my conclusions. I don’t read all the comments, I don’t have time for that. And I don’t want to. So it doesn’t get me down at all.”
The same applies to social media storms. ‘They can write as much as they like,’ Rast grins. ‘It would amuse me more if I had to read something like that.’ He is ‘a racing driver through and through’. And when an opportunity arises, ‘I jump at it, no matter what other people say’.
Is Rast going to continue in the DTM?
But will we see Rene Rast in the DTM at all in 2025? The man from Minden made it clear at the season finale that he has a BMW contract for the coming season and that the program is “still open”. But there is no question of DTM fatigue. “I have always been part of the DTM, even in the junior series. I have been doing this for seven years now and feel very much at home here; this is where my fan base is,” he says.
He also believes “that the day will come when we can fight for a championship again. I think it just needs a bit of fine-tuning and brainpower in the winter to see what can be changed to give all manufacturers an equal chance. But of course you can’t do that in the middle of the season, you might as well tackle it now in the winter.”
In any case, he does not let the setbacks of the season throw him off track. “Of course it’s always frustrating when you have a bad result,” he says. “But we’ve all been in motorsport for so long. You know that there are ups and downs, that you can’t just stay on top of the wave, but that things can go downhill.”
But for him, every race is “like a fresh start. When I wake up in the morning, I approach the matter with a completely fresh mind and think: Today is the day, today we can win again or maybe deliver better results. The guys feel the same way. There’s no one who buries their head in the sand. Everyone gives everything and pushes.”