Why is Timo Glock once again getting nowhere against his team-mate Ben Dorr at the Dorr team this year? The former Formula 1 driver, who produced a combative Sunday race at the Nurburgring but, unlike the team owner’s son, has nothing to do with the front, is pushing back against the prejudice that he is no longer the old Timo Glock. “Well, he’s not gone,” the 44-year-old becomes emotional with ran.de.
He is aware “that people always think: ‘He can’t drive any more!’ I’m not too stupid to drive!” he makes clear. The reasons? “I can only put it this way: We are limited. My engineer knows it, my data engineer knows it, my number-one mechanic knows it – end of story. There is nothing more we can do. There is an A car and a B car – and that’s it.”
So Glock is clearly accusing his team of favouring the car of team-mate Ben Dorr – the son of team owner Rainer Dorr. “It’s the same in the race as it is in qualifying – perhaps a little less so in the race,” Glock says at length.
“The problems are so extreme in qualifying …”
“The problems we have on one side of the garage are so extreme in qualifying that our hands are tied – and I can’t do anything,” says Glock, who qualified 18th and 19th at the Nurburgring while his team-mate was fifth and second, describing his current situation.
Where do the problems lie? “Simply traction out of the corner,” Glock replies. “For whatever reason, I had 60 percent more traction control in qualifying today – lost five tenths in the first sector. Just lots of little things where we don’t know where they come from and why they keep happening.”
That is “a shame and it hurts when you see in the race that it is then reasonably okay.”
What role did newly supplied McLaren software play?
The cause of the excessively intrusive traction control in qualifying is likely to have been newly supplied McLaren software, which, according to the Dorr press release on Sunday after qualifying, was “switched back to the old version” because Glock “had complained about a lack of traction”.
The Nurburgring weekend clearly shows: the problems for Glock are back, after the veteran had most recently said that in Oschersleben, for the first time this season, he had not been held back by technical hurdles over a weekend.
After the Dorr McLaren driver had parked his car early on Saturday at the Nurburgring, on Sunday he used an unused set of tyres to fight his way up from 19th place by eleven positions to eighth – and was involved in spectacular duels.
Single-wheelspin still a problem
Despite fresh tyres, he says he did not come out “of the corners” compared with Nicki Thiim, “because we sometimes have single-wheelspin. That activates the traction control – and that is an ongoing process that keeps making us slow.”
Single wheelspin is one-sided wheelspin, which Glock was already suffering from last year. If the differential does not lock as it should, the car becomes unbalanced on corner entry, which causes oversteer. On acceleration out of the corner, the inside wheel spins – and the traction control intervenes. As well as unstable handling, that also causes increased tyre wear.
Nevertheless, Glock enjoyed himself in the car because of the battles. “That’s what I’m here for – to show awesome racing,” he makes clear. “I kept asking my engineers: ‘Did you see the move?’ So that they have something to laugh about, so that my mechanics have something to laugh about again, because with the issues we have, they are going through hell right now as well.”
