The exact nature of the technical issue that prevented Lamborghini driver Mirko Bortolotti from contesting the second Nurburgring DTM race remains a mystery after the end of the 2023 season.
Bortolotti of SSR Performance was unable to start the second Eifel race in August when his Lamborghini Huracan GT3 broke down on track during qualifying earlier in the day.
The issue arose at the worst possible time for the Italian, who had only the day before demonstrated his title credentials with a lights-to-flag victory in tricky conditions.
Bortolotti finished second in the standings, 33 points behind Porsche’s title winner, Thomas Preining, demonstrating the importance of the DNS in determining the conclusion of this year’s championship battle.
Several months later, no one knows why Bortolotti was relegated to the garage on a day when Lamborghini had a car capable of winning the race, as attested by Maximilian Paul’s shock result with the Grasser team.
“We are not commenting on this,” was SSR team boss Mario Schuhbauer’s response when Motorsport.com’s sister title, Motosport-Total.com, asked if the squad was now willing to provide more information about Bortolotti’s technical problem last month.
The team had also remained silent when repeated attempts were made to reach out for an answer in the immediate aftermath of the race.
Lamborghini has also refused to provide any clarity on the situation, stating, “We don’t release details about a single tech issue that happened months ago.”.
At Hockenheim, another Lamborghini spokesperson told Motorsport-Total.com that the cause of the failure was ‘throttle bodies’, the part of the air intake system that controls how much air flows into an engine’s combustion chamber.
The second Evo version of the Huracan GT3 that was introduced in 2023 has ten electronically-actuated throttle bodies with titanium valves, whereas the predecessor only had two throttle bodies, one per cylinder bank.
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