M4 DTM racers Augusto Farfus and Marco Wittmann finished sixth and ninth in the Saturday sprint in the August 1-2 DTM race weekend on the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria. No BMW racers finished in the points on the track in Sunday’s wet race.
BMW followed its weekend of domination at Zandvoort with a very difficult weekend in Spielberg; Farfus qualified fifth on Saturday, three-tenths of a second off the pace of pole sitter Edoardo Mortara, who went on to win the race for Audi.
None of the BMWs qualified in the top ten for Sunday’s race. The race was delayed by rain, and the first five laps were run behind the safety car. António Félix da Costa’s eleventh was BMW’s best finish on Sunday; Mattias Ekström won in an Audi. Audi racer Timo Schneider was under investigation after the race for last-lap contact with Mercedes’ Robert Wickens that sent both Wickens and Pascal Wehrlein into a gravel trap. An Autosport.com report on the incident appears here. (On Monday Schneider was excluded by the organizers, moving da Costa up into the points in tenth place).
BMW motorsport director Jens Marquardt said, “On the whole, this has been a very difficult weekend for us. Even in dry conditions on Saturday we did not manage to get the best out of our package, with only Augusto Farfus and Marco Wittmann finishing in the points. A tough qualifying session meant that we were always going to have to rely on strategy to get a good result today. For this to be the case, we would have needed a safety car. That never happened. Therefore, eleventh is our best finish. We are obviously not satisfied with that.”
The series runs again at Moscow Raceway on August 29-30.—Brian S. Morgan
