Audi Sport has announced their 2018 driver line-up for DTM today.
That happened in the wake of the Mattias Ekström announcement.
There is a large gap to fill following Ekström leaving the DTM, but the team has chosen to go for a young, but fast replacement of the Swede.
26 year-old Robin Frijns will be taking over the vacant Audi RS5 DTM season, for the coming season.
Loic Duval, Nico Müller, Jamie Green, Mike Rockenfeller and the defending DTM Champion Rene Rast will continue to steer the other 5 cars, in one last battle with both BMW and Mercedes AMG. Mercedes AMG announced that they are going to leave the DTM following the 2018 season, which has made the series look towards Japan, where the Super GT championship utilizes the similar cars but with a different power plant than the V8 that DTM currently uses.
Photo: Audi Communications Motorsport/Michael Kunkel
Frijns is already a well known name by Audi Sport, with his first DTM happening way back in 2013 . He has been driving for several private Audi teams since 2015 in the Blancpain series and VLN plus a lot of other racing series, where an Audi R8 LMS GT3 has been on track.
Frijns also has experience from the FIA Formula E Championship, where he drove several seasons for the Andretti Autosport team. Prior to that, he was lightning fast in the Formula BMW, Formula Renault 2.0 and Formula Renault 3.5 championships, in which he was crowned Champion.
He won the Blancpain GT Series 2015 for the Belgian Audi Club Team WRT, and went on to take the Blancpain GT Series Sprint Cup in 2017, as well as second place in the FIA GT World Cup for the WRT team.
Robin Frijns had his first start at the Daytona 24 Hours this past weekend, where he finished 11th for United Autosports in the Prototype category. It is still possible for him to have more outings for the team, since they don’t have all their seats for 2018 filled yet.
The DTM 2018 season starts at Hockenheim on 5-6 May.
