Andy Priaulx on Agusto Farfus: My greatest rival

Choosing one rival from World Touring Car or DTM is difficult. There are so many drivers capable of winning and the competition is extreme. For example, in 2006, at the last race in Macau, there were nine of us who could have won the championship. It’s not like Formula 1 where one guy can have a big car advantage.

“I’m going for Augusto Farfus. It could have been Gabriele Tarquini or Yvan Muller, but Augusto was the young charger at BMW who challenged me when I was near the end of my career. He was brought in as a young gun by BMW while I was racing both for and against BMW because of the way their teams were competing with each other. I was always up against Schnitzer driving for RBM, a one-car team. It was a tough environment, and it wasn’t in BMW’s game plan that I would win the European championship and then the world championship three years in a row.

“I knew Augusto would be really fast. I reckoned BMW had signed him to knock me off the perch and, sure enough, he was an awful competitor because he was so damn quick. He had very good qualifying pace, and in the sprint races qualifying was everything of course. He was still a youngster. He made mistakes, so that helped, but he just had pure pace. Augusto liked a really nervous car and our car was getting more and more nervous because the tyres were getting harder, and that’s not good when everything is designed around front-wheel drive. So when the car was terrible, he was really good, while my strength was in setting up the car. When I got it ‘in the window’ I could beat him.

“In 2010 he joined RBM, a team that had been built around me, so now I had the quickest guy as my team-mate. It was actually something my career needed. I was in my mid-thirties, he was in his early twenties, so I had to prove I was still competitive. It brought out the best in me. He raised my bar, and made me dig deeper, be more creative. We didn’t win the championship in 2010 but I won six races.

“Augusto is a lovely person. We’ve become close friends, and you don’t have many of those in this business. In the car he was very competitive, typically South American, quite loud, a bit feisty, and at the time I would have driven over him if I could. At that level it’s tough; it’s a harsh environment. I was putting a roof over my head, so was he, so we raced each other pretty hard. I don’t think there was much mutual trust as team-mates. We both wanted to get one over each other on the track.

“By 2015 BMW was changing its rota of drivers. I was moving to the British championship, and Augusto told me he’d learnt everything from me. That was a lovely moment. He’s gone on to have a long career.”

Andy Priaulx and Agusto Farfus head-to-head

Stats taken from World Touring Car Championship 2005-10