Rickard Rydell: “I’m more motivated than ever”

Rickard Rydell is returning to Sweden for his first full season on the Swedish tracks for 23 years. While he is new to many of the tracks, Rydell is aiming for the very top of the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship 2011.
“I’m more motivated than ever. STCC has become one of the strongest championships out there and it has really fired me up ahead of this season,” said Rydell to TouringCarTimes.

The 1998 BTCC champion is going to drive a Chevrolet Cruze alongside his team mate Viktor Hallrup for Chevrolet Team Sweden. The team recently completed four days of testing abroad in preparation for the coming season.

“It was a great test, both for me and for the team. It is going to be a big change for the team to go to two cars and start to work with me and my engineer Jonas Jarlmark. We did about 900 kilometers in four days and got a lot of important data from the car,” said Rydell.

The team tested at the Spanish tracks Calafat and Barcelona, two very different characters of tracks.

“Calafat is more like a Swedish track, short and twisty, while Barcelona is long and fast. With those two tracks you can really learn which types of changes that are needed for fast and slow tracks. We know that our car is fast on a fast track like Mantorp Park and we hope to get the setup right for the slower tracks as well now,” said Rydell.

Rydell completed one test day at Knutstorp and Mantorp Park late last year, other than that, the Swede has not drive on any of the other tracks of the championship with the Chevrolet.

“As we have not done proper test work on the Swedish tracks, we do not know exactly how the car is going to perform on these tracks. But we learnt a lot about the car during these test days. We went through it all, from easy changes on dampers and springs to advanced geometry changes. We did all this in order to be as prepared as possible for the season, when you are right in the heat of qualifying and races, when you need to make quick changes that works. We have got a big tool box with settings that are useable for us and it feels really good,” said Rydell.

Rydell’s team mate, Viktor Hallrup, was present during the test days. Hallrup completed a full season of STCC last year but struggled to get results with one second place in the final race of the year at Mantorp as his best result. Rydell predicts a lot of improvement from the young Swede this year.

“It was his first year with FWD last year and he had no team mate to compare data with, it was not easy for him. He made a lot of progress at the end of last year when we tested together. I think he is going to produce some strong results this year, we will have to see who is going to be fastest of us,” said Rydell.

Another new thing for Rydell is the Chevrolet Cruze. Rydell compares the Cruze with the petrol powered SEAT Léon he drove in the FIA World Touring Car Championship in 2006, before the Spanish manufacturer switched to diesel.

“My first feeling of the Cruze was, wow! It felt like coming back to the petrol SEAT from 2006. The diesel was much heavier in the front and you were not able to push that hard with it. The Chevrolet has got much better balance and I felt comfortable in it straight away,” said Rydell.

Rydell is stepping up his physical training as well in preparation for the coming season.

“I ran a half marathon in the late autumn and I am going to do the “Vasa Loppet” [a 90 km cross-country ski race] this spring, all to put pressure on my self and become ready for the season,” said Rydell.

Rydell is going to face stiff opposition in the STCC 2011 with drivers such as James Thompson, Fredrik Ekblom, Jason Watt, Jan Magnussen and quadruple STCC champion Richard Göransson.

“Already before the new foreign drivers started to join the championship I felt that it was going to be a great challenge to take part in STCC. There are a lot of very good drivers and it is hard to point out one driver as the toughest competitor. The status of the championship grows outside Scandinavia as well with all the international drivers joining the championship. And for me, as I have been racing for factory teams abroad for the last 20 years, I feel even more motivated. It is a new and exciting challenge,” said Rydell.