The Van der Linde brothers have taken GT racing by storm over the last few years. james_newbold looks at the hard road both took to secure their status as professional racers. Feature:
The Volkswagen Scirocco R-Cup that supported DTM from 2010 to 2014 is unlikely to be remembered among the greatest one-make saloon car categories. But it was the crucial stepping stone on two-time Nurburgring 24 Hours winner Kelvin van der Linde’s journey from South Africa to becoming an Audi factory GT driver and securing his younger brother Sheldon’s passage to Europe – which this year culminated in the DTM title.
“But you don’t think about the consequence, you just think, ‘We’ll win it.’ You have that confidence inside: ‘We’re going to win and then we can take the next step.’ Everything worked out, luckily.” Looking back, Kelvin reckons he “wasn’t ready to be a factory driver” in 2015. Without a manager in his corner, he “had nobody to show me how to deal with media, how you deal with the big sponsors on the corporate side”. He won only once in his title defence, at his Sachsenring happy hunting ground alongside fellow teenager Stefan Wackerbauer, then scored just a single point in an aborted 2016 campaign after switching to Car Collection.
The same year, Kelvin scored his first Nurburgring 24 victory with Land Motorsport following a tense rain-affected finish. This result, Sheldon believes, “made my career”, and led to an opportunity to race the Land Audi at the Petit Le Mans IMSA SportsCar Championship round.
“We knew that we both have a lot of potential to reach our goal of becoming DTM champion and with both of us being at Audi, there were not really any available seats at that point, so we needed to split our efforts. That decision was for me the most important one that we did, to split the two of us.”
“I was invited to multiple DTM tests,” he remembers. “I did one test in 2016 [at Jerez] which went really well, I remember Nyck de Vries was there, Alex Palou as well. But all three of us knew there wasn’t going to be a seat because that year they signed Rene already. And from that point, they never opened up a seat until the end of Class 1.”
“None of that was malicious, none of it was on purpose,” he says. “As long as you know what you stand for, it shouldn’t change you. I’m known for my aggressive driving style and to a certain degree you’ve got to stay true to yourself. Why should I go and be a guy that sits behind in the back driving for 60 minutes in a circle? It’s not me.
“Sometimes people ask, ‘Why do you guys support each other so much?,’” he reflects. “It’s almost like people can’t understand why two brothers support each other. To me it’s very weird, it’s the most natural thing in the world to support your family.”
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