Tom Coronel and Esteban Guerrieri provisionally moved to opening race front row

The Chevrolet duo of Tom Coronel and Esteban Guerrieri are set to start tomorrow’s opening race in Morocco from the front row, after the Lada of Yann Ehrlacher and the Honda of Ryo Michigami were excluded from qualifying, however this is provisional as there’s an ongoing investigation into Sébastien Loeb Racing’s Mehdi Bennani’s Q2 lap time.

Ehrlacher had qualified in tenth position and was set to start his first career race in the World Touring Car Championship from pole position, courtesy of the reversed grid, but it soon emerged that Ehrlacher had missed a call to proceed to the FIA scrutineers at the end of qualifying, which saw all his times deleted.

Ryo Michigami, taking part in his second race in the WTCC for Honda, was also punished by the stewards for the same offence. The Japanese driver had qualified in ninth position.

The exclusion of the two drivers promotes Guerrieri and Coronel to ninth and tenth in the qualifying order, with the two Chevrolet drivers flipped onto the front row for the reversed grid opening race.

Although now starting from a strong grid spot tomorrow, Guerrieri has been uncomfortable with the pace of his Cruze TC1 during qualifying.

“The track is nice, and we’re working to make some improvements, but we’re lacking some speed,” said Guerrieri to TouringCarTimes. “I don’t have any experience here, but we can see (Tom) Coronel is also struggling, and we don’t know where we’re lacking speed.

“There’s some imbalance in the car and we’re trying to resolve that, especially in sector two.”

There’s an outstanding investigation into Mehdi Bennani’s lap time from Qualifying 2 which may yet alter the grid further. The Moroccan, who qualified in fifth position, is believed to have set his best time while the yellow flags were out.