After two seasons driving for LADA SPORT ROSNEFT in the FIA World Touring Car Championship (WTCC), I have fond memories of Moscow, the Russian people and fans, and I have always had the spotlight firmly on me when I have visited, albeit for the races or on PR trips.
This time, racing with Castrol Honda Racing, I was looking forward to a little less attention and a bit more time to enjoy Moscow before getting down to the weekend’s racing duties.
I opted to fly out to the Russian capital on the Tuesday (7 June) so I had an opportunity to look around Moscow and do all the touristy things I have wanted to do for the past few years, like visiting the Kremlin, Red Square and Gorky Park.
The Moscow Raceway is quite a way out of the Russian Capital – around 80km – so travelling to and from the track and the city is never really an option, so an early arrival was perfect.
It was Thursday (9 June) when I ventured out to the track. After the trials of the Nurburgring and the contention over the FIA’s and Honda’s interpretation of the rules, the team and I were hoping to get some focus back into the racing and not the politics that had dogged the previous weeks.
Since the last race, there has been an appeal hearing by the FIA in Paris and our results from Slovakia have been reinstated, but, bizarrely, those from Morocco have not, so my points total has taken a bit of a hit.
I was keen to get some good points on the board, although the championship would now be a long shot, whereas before the ruling, we were sitting in a far better position.
Come testing and free practice, the weather was on the turn and rain was forecasted. It held off for the first two sessions and we worked on refining the setup, but what was immediately obvious was that my old team, LADA SPORT, was on a mission to impress at home.
The yellow cars seemed to be having a good run, whereas Honda and its rivals were struggling for grip across the board.
Second practice and qualifying were wet and, to be honest, this made matters worse. LADA was up the road on times and grip while we made the best of the situation. My efforts in qualifying got me through Q2, but I finished in the dreaded P11, missing out on the chance of any reversed grid benefits. I was resigned to getting stuck-in to some good old fashioned overtaking if I was going to leave Russia with any decent points.
Raceday started bright enough for me to sit on slicks on the grid, hoping the dry weather would play back into our favour, but the rain came on the formation lap before the race. Start delayed. Wet race. Bugger.
When the race did get going it was 17 laps of slipperiness. Myself and my teammates, Tiago Monteiro and Norbert Michelisz, struggled for grip from start-to-finish and my efforts to move three places up to eighth was the best we were going to manage.
Race two followed in quick succession, but my engineer Duncan Laycock found something that we hoped would improve the grip levels. Thankfully, he was right; a small change in the available time gave me a fighting chance and I really had a good race, passing six cars, including the Citroens of Yvan Muller and Jose Maria Lopez along the way to a decent fourth place, showing off some great racecraft and experience along the way.
In the championship I am now P8, but just a handful of points from P2. P1 is still a distant hope at the moment, with Lopez near double the tally of everyone else; Honda’s non-points score in Morocco had had a double whammy of gifting him more points.
Still, we will keep pushing! You never know what’s around the corner in a long season and we only reach the halfway point in Portugal in a couple of weeks’ time.
I will again be pleased to go about my business out of the spotlight while the weight of expectation and the hopes of a nation are firmly on the shoulders of my Portuguese teammate Tiago Monteiro.
After the racing we headed back into Moscow for the evening, for a relaxed steak with Tom Chilton, who had an even worse weekend than us – it was nice to hear we weren’t the only ones with tales of woe.
Hanging out with Tom for a chilled evening also made me remember the last two years when we were sampling a little too much Russian hospitality with the LADA team and teammates, but taking it easy meant Monday and the trip to the airport was a much more pleasant experience than before.
I even got the chance to get up and explore the shopping in the morning, unheard of in my LADA days! However, nothing we did with LADA came close to Tom’s “dress” sense. You best ask him to give you the reasons behind his choice of attire!