The WestCoast Racing Sportpromotion team are looking forward to a pair of strong races on Sunday, with drivers Gianni Morbidelli and Mikhail Grachev in contention for wins, starting from the front for both of the day’s races at the Buriram Internation Circuit in Thailand.
In a close qualifying session, Morbidelli continued to demonstrate the strong pace he had shown all weekend in the team’s Honda Civic TCR.
The Italian has been either fastest or second-fastest in every session throughout, but unfortunately for the five-time TCR International Series race winner, the second part of qualifying was one of those where he’d be second after innocently handing a slipstream to his championship rival, who beat him to pole by just one-thousandth of a second.
“I tried to do my best. We worked very well during the two days here, we had a good test yesterday, and I want to thank the team for their big effort,” said Morbidelli.
“I did a good lap, but it’s hard after three laps on new tyres. 0.001 is a question of millimetres, we’re talking about nothing,” he added.
“Tomorrow the race will be very tough here, the temperature is very high and it makes the car very difficult to drive, so it will not be an easy race.”
Mikhail Grachev will start from pole position for the second race courtesy of the reversed top ten grid. With the Russian driver ambivalent about the result, is looking forward to the opportunity to extend his win count on Sunday to be the driver with the most wins in the season.
“On one side, I’m not so happy, as I’d like to be further in front, but from the other side I’ll be on pole position for the reversed grid, so for this I’m happy,” said Grachev.
“We have a lot of time to find a problem we have with our set-up, as I wasn’t able to take the full performance from fresh tyres in Qualifying 2. Because it was much hotter in the afternoon, I think our set-up didn’t work so well, but I’m lucky as I have a strong team-mate, and they have a good set-up for hot conditions, and it’s good as everything is open here at WestCoast Racing, nobody hides anything.”