After his brilliant performance in yesterday’s first race of the 2015 DTM season, when he raced to tenth from 23rd on the grid in his Shell BMW M4 DTM, Augusto Farfus experienced a difficult Sunday at Hockenheim. The new Sunday format for 2015 is a warm-up session, a 20-minute qualifying and a 60-minute race, including a mandatory pit stop. The BMW Team RBM driver from Curitiba had to settle for 21st in today’s second race of the season.
While it was dry yesterday, drivers and teams had to cope with mixed conditions today. It rained in the morning, so qualifying started in wet conditions, but the track dried while the drivers were fighting for their grid positions. It then started to rain again 20 minutes into the race. Coming from 16th on the grid, Farfus made up some positions during the dry opening laps, but when the rain returned he was fighting with blunt weapons, crossing the line in 21st.
“Our results do not in any way reflect our speed, as we had a strong car over the entire weekend,” commented Farfus after the second race. “We had the pace this morning in qualifying and in the wet I was flying. But then in the race, we completely lost the pace. So we have to investigate further what happened, because apparently all the BMWs struggled in the wet. A long season is ahead of us, as we still have 16 races to go and a lot of things can still happen. But we have to speed up the process and catch up with the leaders.”
The season opener at Hockenheim was the first round held with the new format of two races per weekend. Farfus’ summary of this new schedule is a positive one: “I like it. We had two races with a lot of action, and we had one dry and one wet. That was very nice and I also think the fans liked having so much action on track.”
After the season opener at Hockenheim, Farfus is 15th in the 2015 Drivers’ rankings with one point. The second round will be held at Germany’s Lausitzring from 29th to 31st May. In the meantime, Farfus will still be busy racing: on 16th and 17th May he will tackle the iconic 24-hour race on the Nürburgring-Nordschleife in the BMW Sports Trophy Team Marc VDS BMW Z4 GT3.
