Sébastien Loeb Racing Team Principal Dominique Heintz admits that the team will have to ‘burn the midnight oil’ to be ready for the FIA World Touring Car Cup (WTCR) races at the Slovakiaring in two weeks’ time.
Both of the Volkswagen Golf GTi cars of Mehdi Bennani and Rob Huff were destroyed in the first lap pile-up in race one on the streets of Vila Real last weekend.
Huff and Bennani made contact at Turn 3, spectacularly pitching both cars into the barriers at speed and subsequently into the rest of the chasing pack.
It meant the weekend went from high to low in an instant for the French team, who had just hours earlier locked out the front row of the grid in qualifying.
Heintz says the team have now taken delivery of two brand new Golf GTi TCR cars, and they will have just two weeks to prepare them for the next event on 14 – 15 July.
“The weekend got off to a great start and we had high hopes after the excellent work carried out by the team in free practice and qualifying,” said Heintz.
“Unfortunately, it quickly turned into a nightmare. There’s no other word to describe it. But the main thing is that both our drivers, Rob and Mehdi, were okay.
“The time we spent waiting to find out how they were seemed to go on forever. My thoughts are with them and I wish them both a speedy recovery.
“We missed out on a weekend in which we should have scored a great result, but now the whole team is motivated to tackle the event in Slovakia.
“We’re going to be burning the midnight oil over the few days that separate us from the next event. It’s extremely rare to have two cars destroyed in the same race.
“Now we have no other choice but to work hard to present two new cars that meet our standard of quality and get back to our usual top-class level in Slovakia in two weeks.”
For his part in the accident, Moroccan racer Bennani admits that he doesn’t know what happened, but believes the corner is possible to take on side-by-side with another car.
“Rob and I were exceptionally motivated to make a good start on the Vila Real circuit,” said Bennani.
“My getaway was okay, and I got through the first corner without problems; at that moment I reckoned I could tackle the second in the same way, side-by-side, as we knew it was possible.
“Unfortunately, we don’t really know what happened; we collided and hit the guardrail.”