Even though the first race of the Nürburgring weekend was disappointing for Augusto Farfus, the Brazilian refused to consider anything that was not positive. Therefore, he was pleased with the pace of his Shell BMW M4 DTM, which gave him reason to be optimistic for Sunday’s second race.
On the time sheets the BMW Team RBM driver was classified 18th and the last of the cars that were still running at the end of the race. His problems began in morning qualifying as he explained: “Qualifying today did not help. With the first set of tyres it was all right, but with the second set we lost the sweet spot and so the best I could do was 16th, which was just under half a second off pole.”
The race started but immediately there was quite a lot of carnage and the Safety Car was brought out on the first lap. Due to a lot of debris on the track, the organisers decided to ref flag the race to clear the track. At this point Augusto had moved up to 13th. However, when the race was restarted about ten minutes later behind the Safety Car he was in trouble as the driver side door would not shut so he had to come into the pits to get this fixed. He lost a lot of time while this was sorted, and so was never able to catch up again.
The Brazilian’s comment after the race was: “You have to try and take the positive side of what happened. The door opened, it did not allow us to try and show our true pace, and that pace was very strong. I was as fast as Max (Maxime Martin) and sometimes even faster. So we showed that our package is somehow there and tomorrow with this package we can try for big points. There is a destiny for everything and this was what it was for us today, the door opened.”
