Augusto Farfus will be back at the wheel of his Shell BMW M4 DTM in Moscow this weekend after the DTM summer break, and aims to have used this time to take a breather and analyse the season so far. He is determined to turn round his fortunes over the past few races and be back in the middle of the action and scoring points.
As usual, the Brazilian looks to the positives and not the negatives: “I took home from Zandvoort some very good pointers for the rest of the season. We had a very good race pace and a very good car. We took this lesson away with us and now aim to improve our qualifying performance so we can start scoring points again. I think the break will have done us a lot of good, as it gives you some time to breath and analyse the results so far, and I shall try to come back stronger.”
He also only has to look back at what has happened in the past at the Moscow Raceway for both him and his team to feel confident about the weekend ahead: “I was on the podium in 2013 when we raced there for the first time, and BMW Team MTEK had two podium finishes there last year.”
The track is the most modern one on the DTM schedule and so has state of the art facilities, which the driver from Curitiba likes: “It is a nice place and I like the track as it is flowing. The only problem is it is not easy to overtake on, but the facilities are first class.”
One of the down sides of the race is the traffic that makes the journey too and from the track long. It is near the city of Volokolamsk in the outskirts of Moscow, 80 kilometres west of the Russian capital. It was opened in 2012 and was the first international track to be built in Russia.
The schedule for the DTM on the 3.931 kilometre track starts with FP1 from 18.00 to 18.30 on Friday (19th August). For Saturday it is FP2 from 10.30 to 09.00, qualifying from 12.10 to 12.30 and the 40-minute race starts at 14.33. On Sunday it is FP3 from 10.10 to 10.40, qualifying from 11.50 to 12.10 and the 60-minute race starts at 14.13. All times are local times.
