Augusto Farfus finished just outside the points in the first race of the DTM weekend in Hockenheim. The Brazilian steered the Shell BMW M4 DTM to 11th place, after suffering with tyre degradation toward the end of the 40-minute sprint race.

The BMW Team MTEK driver qualified well, in seventh place, and delivered from the start, too. He was in the top six for a good while, but the drop-off in performance towards the end of the race saw several cars find their way past, particularly on the long back straight. “We lost a lot of pace over the course of the race,” he explained. “I’m not sure exactly what caused it, so we’ll have to investigate. For the first ten laps I thought we could fight, but then we lost some grip and had high degradation on the tyres. There wasn’t much we could do at that point. I was just trying to hang on in my position, but it was not possible.”

He was able to start strongly and was in sixth place at the 20-minute mark. However, as the race wore on, so did the tyres, and the further the rubber had to go, the worse the situation got. Farfus was powerless to resist in the race’s closing laps, ending outside the points in 11th.

The BMW Motorsport works driver must now trust in his team to make progress before the second race, on Sunday. “We have to adjust slightly. We’ve got a quick qualifying car, but we struggled to maintain that over the whole race, so there’s improvement to be made. We’ll look into it and see what we can do tomorrow.”

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