Augusto Farfus was disappointed with the outcome of the second DTM race of the weekend at the picturesque Red Bull Ring in Austria. In treacherous weather conditions from 23rd on the grid he could only manage 19th at the end of the one hour, 34 lap race in his Shell BMW M4 DTM.
After two days of glorious sunshine the weather gods were not being kind to the DTM, as on Sunday the heavens opened and the rain poured down in the early morning. The warm-up was abandoned after eight of the 20 minutes, but by the time qualifying started at 12.40 it was just spitting. However, on a very wet track all the BMW cars struggled and the best the BMW Team RBM driver could achieve was a time of 1min 44.983 secs. As usual, in such conditions timing was critical and the Audi of Mattias Ekström was on the track at the right time and his lap was 1min 42.010 secs. He eventually went on to win the race.
When it came the time for the race start the rain was heavy again, with a temperature of only 15 degrees Celsius, and so it was delayed for ten minutes and started behind the Safety Car. This pulled in at the end of lap five with just under 50 minutes of racing to go. It was only a short time into the race at the end of lap seven that the first set of compulsory pit stops started, and the Brazilian was one of those to come in for fresh rain tyres.
Afterwards Augusto’s comment about a race in which no BMW was able to score points was: “I really don’t know what to say about today, as none of us BMW drivers had the pace. Okay there were some BMWs that were a little bit faster at the beginning and some a little bit faster at the end, but we were far off the pace of the competition. It was a shame. BMW just scored ten points in total this weekend, eight were mine, two from Marco (Wittmann), and this is not what we want. This is definitely not good enough.”
Many of the drivers were sliding off the track into the gravel, but luckily they were all able to continue. Augusto explained a bit about the conditions facing all 24 drivers and what was important to have a good race: “The visibility was the main issue for almost the entire race. It was very difficult to get the tyres to work and those who did manage to get them to work made the difference. That at the end is what we could not do. You saw a lot of mistakes from all of us, and that showed how difficult it was to keep the car on the track.”
The DTM teams and drivers now have a few weeks break until rounds 11 and 12 in Russia at the Moscow Raceway on the 29th and 30th August.
