Photo: WTCC Media

Lada disappointed with final qualifying result in China

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LADA Sport Lukoil drivers James Thompson and Mikhail Kozlovskiy have qualified 14th and 21st for the penultimate round of the FIA World Touring Car Championship in Shanghai, and have cause to be disappointed after Thompson’s Lada Granta had been in the top ten all weekend.

Thompson had set the fourth fastest time in the final practice session on Saturday morning, half a second down on the RML Chevrolet of Yvan Muller’s ultimate pace, but couldn’t replicate that pace in qualifying, although seven-tenths faster, was 1.2 seconds down on Muller’s Q1 time and nearly two seconds off of the ultimate pace of the Chevrolet driver.

“It was a good start to the weekend. We were fifth fastest in testing, which is encouraging,” said Thompson. “When it came to FP1 we were ninth and in FP2 we were fourth, so we can see that we’re able to improve the pace. But I have to say that I’m pretty disappointed by our performance in qualifying: the car wasn’t as quick as we expected, even though we were just a tenth of a second off the top 12.

“One of the big problems was that our new set of tyres didn’t allow us to improve in the way that we wanted. Now we’re analysing all the data carefully and hopefully we’ll have better pace tomorrow. So far it’s been a very good learning experience for next season, when we’ll be able to come back to this tricky circuit with a bit of prior knowledge, which is very important.”

Team-mate Mikhail Kozlovskiy was 21st fastest, just six-tenths of a second behind his Lada team-mate, and will start between the BMW of Fredy Barth and the SEAT of René Münnich for both of tomorrow’s races.

“It was tough in the morning but at least we were able to improve in Q1,” said Kozlovskiy. “It still wasn’t enough though, as we wanted to qualify a bit higher up the grid to be honest. We managed to improve our lap times with the first two sets of tyres, but it wasn’t ideal with the third set. I was overtaking but then I get boxed in at the first series of corners, which cost me the chance to improve.”