BMW's Sheldon van der Linde admits the pressure of fighting for the DTM title was so high that he struggled to sleep at night in the run-up to the Hockenheim finale.
, as Auer struggled to seventh with heavy success ballast on his Mercedes.
“For me the best way to describe this right now is taking 300kg and taking it off my shoulders because I had so much pressure the whole weekend. “Coming from South Africa as a young boy it is extremely hard to really break through and really make it as a professional racing driver first of all and then be a champion.
“It was obviously hard for me to keep a cool head after I experienced what happened [on Saturday],” he said. Although van der Linde didn’t feature in the battle for victory in Sunday’s finale after struggling in the opening stint and was only promoted to the final spot of the podium after a puncture for Grasser Lamborghini driver“I had to tell my team to bring me early for a pitstop because I had zero performance on that tyre in the first stint, I was almost half a second or more too slow,” he said.
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