was so near yet so far for Augusto Farfus and his team-mates in the number 1 BMW M3 GT at the Nürburgring 24 Hours. After a day and night of racing over 156 laps of the 25.378-kilometre Nordschleife circuit the Brazilian, along with Jörg Müller, Uwe Alzen and Pedro Lamy, covered just under 4,000 kilometres and finished second, four and a half minutes behind the winning Porsche.

Farfus had started off the weekend well by setting the car’s fastest lap for fifth on the grid, and then he was given the honour of doing the final stint and so took the chequered flag. While Team BMW Motorsport must have been disappointed not to repeat last year’s win, this was a great achievement for all concerned.

“Standing on a podium is always great, but doing it here at the home of BMW is something extra special. To have 250,000 people camping out in the Eifel mountains to watch this race says something about how important it is, and to me this is the greatest track on the planet. A win would have been nice, especially as this is the last race we have our motorsport boss, Mario Theissen, in charge. I hope he can see we did our best for him and I want to wish him all the best for the future,” said Farfus.

The Eifel region was particularly kind to the competitors in this legendary event. Despite some rain just before the start, there was no precipitation of any kind – in the past there has been snow for this race – between the start at 4pm on Saturday and the finish at 4pm on Sunday. However, this didn’t mean there were no incidents, as only 135 of the 202 starters finished.

Looking back at the race Farfus also said: “The level of competition in this is race is so high. It is even higher than when we were here last year, so it isn’t an endurance race any more. We really have to push, have to try to get every second and try to lose as little time as possible. So this year for me it was a kind of big world touring car championship race where I had to push all the time. Every overtaking manoeuvre was on the limit, but the luck was unfortunately not on our side. Pedro had a collision with another car and lost a few minutes, but at the end we had to go for that. The winners also had a collision, but they were a little bit luckier than us. Finally we are happy we had this good race. I think even if we didn’t win it was a great result.”

Farfus and the team cannot rest as next weekend it is the fourth round of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Imola, Italy. After a class win in Sebring, as well as podiums in both Spa-Francorchamps and Le Mans, BMW is in a strong position in this series.