From 2000 to 2020, the "new DTM" continued the former Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft (German Touring Car Championship) and ITC (International Touring Car Championship) which were discontinued after 1996 due to high costs. The series raced prototype silhouette racing cars based on mass-production road cars in the same period. The second iteration went by the full name during its first five years. Since 2005, all official documents have only referred to the series using the abbreviated name.
During the ITC era, a large proportion of the revenue generated by the championship went to the FIA, which led to complaints from the teams regarding the small return on their increasingly large investment in the high-tech touring car series. Since 1997, many ideas had been discussed in order to find a compromise for the rules of a new DTM racing series. Opel put the primary emphasis on cost control, Mercedes-Benz supported expensive development in competition, BMW wanted an international series rather than one focused on Germany only, while Audi insisted on allowing their trademark quattro four-wheel drive system. DTM returned in 2000 as Mercedes and Opel had agreed to use cars that were based on the concept car that was shown by Opel on various occasions. The series adopted the format of the 1995 championship, with most rounds held in Germany and occasional rounds throughout Europe.
In May 2000, the new DTM started with the traditional Hockenheimring round on the short course. While Opel's cars could match the speed of most Mercedes cars in the 2000 season, the hastily developed Abt-Audi ended up outclassed. As the body shape of the TT had rather poor aerodynamics, Abt was allowed to use a version with a stretched wheelbase and bodyshell in later years. Further dispensation was also granted, such as increased rear wing height, which helped the Abt-Audi TT-R win the DTM championship in 2002 with Laurent Aïello.
After their successes with the Audi R8 and the official support of the Abt-TT-Rs at the Nürburgring, Audi finally joined the DTM as a factory entrant in 2004. The three constructors involved decided to switch to D-segment compact executive-based saloon bodies. The road models used as patterns since 2004 are the Audi A4, Opel Vectra GTS and the Mercedes-Benz C-Class. Audi immediately had success in 2004 with Swedish driver Mattias Ekström, becoming a DTM series champion for the first time.
The DTM carried on with only two manufacturers in spite of the television agreement requiring three manufacturers to participate in the series. The 2007–2009 seasons were marked by the dominance of Audi. Swede Mattias Ekström won the second of his two titles in 2007, and Timo Scheider took the driver's championship in the following two years. Mercedes-Benz were in the runner-up positions in both 2008 and 2009. In 2010, Mercedes finally bridged the gap to Audi, as Paul di Resta won the 2010 championship driving for AMG-Mercedes.
In 2014, the body shape and aerodynamic pieces of all DTM cars were modified to improve racing. The double-header races (Saturday and Sunday races) were also revived in 2015, thus switching from races with total laps run to timed races. The qualifying format was also reformatted into a single-session timed qualification. Performance weights were also introduced to determine the winning car's weight. In 2017, the DTM field size was reduced from 24 to 18 cars total to improve quality as well as increasing affordability for its existing manufacturers.
The 2021 season switched to a GT3-based regulation, otherwise known as GT Plus, due to the sudden withdrawal of Audi in 2020 which left only BMW with an eligible Class 1 car. In December 2022, the parent body of the DTM, ITR, was dissolved, leaving ADAC to acquire the rights to the championship name. The DTM continued in name-only from 2023 onwards, with completely different organisation and regulations compared with just three years previous.
In March 2010, The GT Association (the governing body of the Super GT series in Japan) initially announced that the ITR were beginning to align the technical regulations with Super GT's GT500 class and NASCAR's Grand American Road Racing Association Grand Touring division to form a new Grand Touring specification. In October 2012, a cooperation agreement between DTM and Super GT was signed in Berlin. The agreement regarding the use of the 'New DTM' regulations by Japan's Super GT began in 2014 and ran for four years. DTM moved away from its previous 4.0-litre V8 specification in favour of 2.0-litre turbos in 2019, which Super GT had implemented in 2014.
When the DTM series returned, it used a similar format to the final season of the former DTM in 1996: two races of 100 kilometres, with a short break between them. In 2001 and 2002 there was a short race of 35 kilometres as well as a long race of 100 kilometres, which included one pit stop and points scored for the top 10 as in earlier seasons. From 2003 to 2014 there was only one race, which had a distance of about 250 kilometres, and two mandatory pit stops.
Drivers have included a mixture of young and older drivers, including well known former Formula One drivers David Coulthard, Bernd Schneider, Allan McNish, Jean Alesi, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, Ralf Schumacher, JJ Lehto, Pedro Lamy, Karl Wendlinger, Emanuele Pirro, Stefano Modena, two-time F1 world champion Mika Häkkinen and F1 2008 Canadian Grand Prix winner Robert Kubica. Others, such as Laurent Aïello, Tom Kristensen, Dindo Capello, Frank Biela, Marco Werner, Lucas Luhr, Alexandre Prémat, Yves Olivier, Jaroslav Janiš, and Alain Menu have made their career racing in sports cars and touring cars.
Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters cars closely resemble public road vehicles as a reference to the silhouette racing car format. The championship controls and specifies the chassis/car and engine manufacturers that teams are allowed to use each season. The league's choice of manufacturers saw frequent changes between its revival in 2000 and the end of the "DTM Prototype" era in 2020, due to constantly changing car specification regulations and excessive expenditure on the Silhouette Prototype cars.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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