Tiago Monteiro enjoying his strongest start to-date

Honda’s Tiago Monteiro is having his strongest season start in the FIA World Touring Car Championship, sitting fourth in the standings, closest to the all-conquering Citroëns, but admits that fourth could be the best possible result for the team unless more mistakes are made by the French manufacturer’s drivers.

The 37-year-old currently has 71 points in the Championship standings, and is 38 points behind Yvan Muller after the Slovakiaring weekend. A pair of podiums at the Hungaroring has been the highpoint of the season, although the Portuguese driver perhaps lost his best shot so far to take his first win since Shanghai, when the second race in Slovakia was rained off while he was set to start from pole position.

“I don’t want to jinx it, but most of my seasons have started so badly,” said Monteiro to TouringCarTImes. “(There have been) so many crashes, people pushing me out, and engine or mechanical issues. When you look at most of my seasons, they’ve always been like that.

“This year I was really focussed on trying to stay out of trouble, and try to score some points from the beginning. But I usually say that, and it doesn’t seem to work. But at the moment, I can’t complain.”

The new Honda Civic struggled at the power circuit in Marrakech, but rescued good results at a slippery Paul Ricard, and then seemed stronger at the Hungaroroing and the Slovakiaring, where engine power was not so important a factor, but the Honda team know that with plenty of tracks where engine power matters, most notably the Salzburgring this weekend, they need to work on that area fast.

“The 60kg (of ballast reduction) is helping a lot, but we do have small updates that we’re working on,” added Monteiro. “There are so many strange things about these cars compared to last year. Many things that used to work on the cars last year don’t work this year etc., so it’s not so easy to understand, that’s why you need track time in testing ideally, but we’re even discovering things on the weekends.

“We definitely have a good chassis, but it’s clear that the difference that you could see in Marrakech was in the engine. We haven’t had any updates in the engine, but we will have, but I don’t know when. This is still our weak point, though we still have to work on the chassis and many different areas as well.”

With the new TC1-class rules this year, the cars are far more aggressively styled, lighter, with a lot more carbon fibre materials and racing-specific components, more akin to the style of race cars which Monteiro’s career began with.

“I was expecting more though, I was hoping for more,” said Monteiro. “I was hoping it would be closer to a single-seater or a prototype, but unfortunately not. It’s not a car dominated by the aerodynamics, it’s still a chassis car, which is helped by aerodynamics. So unfortunately the aerodynamics are not as strong as I’d hoped. I’d driven in many years aero-driven cars, so I have still have that in me, as I still have more years in those than I have had in touring cars.”

In terms of the Championship battle, with Citroën effectively dominating so far, with only one race victory going to another manufacturer with Chevrolet RML scooping a win at the reversed grid second race in Hungary for Gianni Morbidelli, Monteiro admits that hopes of challenging for the title are probably over.

“It’ll be difficult. I haven’t really started thinking about it, but unless they make mistakes they’re always going to be strong,” he said. “I’m not expecting us to catch and overtake them so much in the season that we can recover all the points. We need to hope that they make mistakes, that we can fight, and that’ll help us to steal points away from them.

“It’s a long Championship, and anything can happen, but we cannot dream too much. The only target will be P3 maybe, because Sébastien (Loeb) could make mistakes. He’s proven that he’s very fast but you can see that he’s lacking some of the racing craft that the others have, so this could be our only chance to pass one Citroën in the Championship. But otherwise, fourth in the Championship could be the best of the rest situation.”