The LADA Sport LUKOIL team – the only Russian squad in the FIA World Touring Car Championship – had a tough race in round nine of the series, held in California. After a great result in the warm-up, with James Thompson recording the second-fastest time, the team was determined to fight hard in both races. However, making their way up from the middle of the grid proved to be no easy task for both drivers. In Race 1 James Thompson finished 14th with his team mate Mikhail Kozlovskiy 19th. In Race 2 James finished 16th, while Mikhail was 18th.
Sonoma proved to be a track that was not particularly well-suited to the LADA Granta, as the team suspected before the start of the event. In fact, the Russian cars tend to perform better on fast circuits with long straights, taking advantage of a high top speed. By contrast, Sonoma is mostly about corners and short straights: not ideal territory for the LADA Granta. But as LADA Sport LUKOIL team principal Victor Shapovalov underlined, the Sonoma race was very valuable in terms of gathering information for the engineers. The team is already working on the next evolution of the Granta for 2014, so every new track, especially a layout as specific as Sonoma, provides important new data for the car's future development.
After the race, the LADA Sport LUKOIL drivers shared their first impressions of racing in the USA.
James Thompson said: “This was a difficult weekend that left us with mixed feelings. On the one hand, we improved a lot compared to qualifying, and the warm-up session, where I was second overall, confirmed that. We improved our time over one lap but our race performance could have been better. And we were sometimes struggling with the tyres a bit as well. In the end though, we were fighting all the way and trying hard and we managed to put some strong competitors behind us. So that's the positive side. But after a run of good weekends, when we’ve been consistently in the top 10 and twice in the top six, our expectations have grown, so from that point of view the Sonoma race was quite disappointing. Still, there have definitely been some highlights from the weekend and we’ve got a lot of information to prepare for next year now. I’m sure that next year we’ll come back to the USA much better prepared.”
Mikhail Kozlovskiy added: “Both races were very tough. In Race 2 I managed to make a very good start and make up several positions. We were fighting with James and some of the other guys. But then Charles Ng cut Turn 2 in front of me and forced me to go wide. This was used by some of the drivers behind me to get past. After qualifying we changed a few things in the set-up and I could really feel the improvement but unfortunately we experienced some problems with the stability of the car during the race, and as I predicted yesterday, this affected our tyre wear. Hopefully the circuit in Japan will suit our car better.”
After its epic American adventure, the WTCC heads off to another continent: Asia. Round 10 of the series will take place from 21-22 September in Japan, at the famous Suzuka circuit.
