DTM Hungaroring: BMW feels hotter weather led to disastrous result

Bruno Spengler was the best of the Munich manufacturer's drivers in 12th position, while pre-weekend series leader Timo Glock lost his championship advantage to Mercedes' Gary Paffett after finishing 14th.

BMW feels it lost its way in qualifying, in which its best representative was Augusto Farfus in eighth place, after taking fourth spot with Joel Eriksson in Friday's dry free practice session, and fifth with Glock in the wet Saturday morning FP2.

BMW sports boss Jens Marquardt told Autosport: "We've been, I think, pretty good in the free practice sessions.

"Somehow for qualifying we lost a lot of performance and then obviously consequently in the race, which we clearly have to analyse and figure out why that is.

"With the increase in temperatures it looks like our performance really went south.

"It's across all cars - we tried an aggressive strategy [Glock, Spengler, Eriksson and Philipp Eng all made their pitstops in the opening two laps], and with Marco Wittmann a normal strategy, and the result was pretty much similar.

"Once you're locked in with your set-up for qualifying, we would have needed rain or something like that today."

Glock added that he was compromised in qualifying by getting caught behind the Mercedes of Lucas Auer, with his RMR-run M4 ending up 16th out of the 18-car grid.

"The car didn't feel bad," the ex-Formula 1 racer told Autosport.

"I was very surprised in qualifying - the first run was OK; I was at some point P5 and dropped to P10.

"On the second outing I couldn't do the warm-up phase for the tyres that I wanted because Lucas was in front - he had a different procedure, so I had to back off and I couldn't get anything out of my second set of tyres."

Glock also rued locking up his tyres at Turn 1 as he exited the pits in a vain bid to stay ahead of Spengler.

"I had so much vibration on the front-left after that," he said.

"I lost performance in the car and for sure that cost me lap time in the stint - I should have been less aggressive.

"Unfortunately I was then stuck behind Bruno for some time, but we didn't have the pace of the other guys."

Glock remained upbeat that this is just a blip in the notoriously unpredictable DTM.

"This is the DTM," he said.

"If you asked Audi after the first race at Hockenheim then they would not be happy - for some reason we just couldn't put it together on this track."