Honda’s Tiago Monteiro admits it was a “frustrating day” on Sunday, after the Portuguese driver endured his first pointless weekend of the World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) season in Beijing.
Monteiro had shown encouraging pace in all of the practice sessions on Saturday, ending the test session and first practice as the fastest driver and finishing second practice briefly fastest, before his final lap (which was fastest of all) was disallowed when the session was red-flagged early.
However Sunday would prove to be problematic from the very start. Qualifying had been moved to race day for the first time for scheduling reasons, and Monteiro could only manage the 11th best time, missing out on the all-important top ten reversal for race two.
In race one, Monteiro was running in tenth position when contact from Mehdi Bennani behind damaged the suspension on his Honda Civic.
“It was a frustrating day,” surmised Monteiro. “After the performance we had demonstrated early in the weekend, we were convinced that we would have a good qualifying and be able to fight for victory in both races. But then everything happened in reverse. I had a good start in race one and aspired to get points, but after a touch from an opponent I was forced to retire.”
With little time in between the two races, Monteiros JAS Motorsport team had little choice but to take his car out of parc fermé and thus resign him to starting race two from the back of the grid. From there he went on to finish outside the points in 13th position – his first pointless weekend in the WTCC since June 2013.
“I had to start from the back of the grid, which made things difficult, but I still had the same pace as the front runners,” explained Monteiro. “Unfortunately after a while something broke on the right rear shock and it became impossible to make a good approach to the corners. It was a bad finish to a weekend that had started so well!
“Our race results did not reflect the good performance we had in practice but that’s racing! At least I am still fourth in the Driver’s Championship points table.
“At the start we had a remarkable performance but the result does not reflect all the hard work we did. Now we have just four days to understand what happened and face a new challenge.”
JAS Motorsport Managing Director Alessandro Mariani admits that despite the misfortune the pace of the Civic was good after further development work was carried out in the two months since the previous event in Argentina.
“Because of circumstances on track we had a bad weekend,” said Mariani. “Tiago missed his chance in Q2, Gabriele [Tarquini] didn’t make a good start in race one and it is very difficult to overtake on this tight circuit. On the positive side we did a good job on improving the car and the pace was good.”
Honda head to Shanghai for the next round of the championship this weekend (11/12 October).