Photo: WTCC

Yvan Muller hopes to challenge for title number five this year, after tough 2014

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Citroën Total WTCC driver Yvan Muller hopes to put the bad luck which wiped out his championship challenge before it even began last year behind him, and hopes to be able to win his fifth world title this year against the competition from his team-mates, as well as the improved Hondas and the reconstructed Lada programme.

Muller, who will sport the #68 on his car this year, the administrative code for the Haut-Rain region in France where he’s from, believes that there has been progress with the C-Elysée WTCC, even though Citroën have at this point done the least track testing of any of the manufacturers since last year’s season finale in Macau.

“We tested one day each driver last week in Valencia, that’s all we’ve done on a proper circuit,” said Muller to TouringCarTimes. “We did some straight-line testing and things like that at the factory, and we’re doing one day here (Barcelona) with Seb (Loeb) and next week we’ll do one day each in Portugal. There is some change on the car, I don’t know yet if it’s a real improvement, there’s some good signs in the feeling, but we’ll see that at the first race.”

“You can’t really compare the lap times, you can compare the feeling. When there is an improvement it is only step-by-step, only one-tenth or two-tenths, because imagine if we win one-tenth per day, that’s one second after ten days, that doesn’t exist. There is some improvement, and we’ll see during the season.”

On whether he expects he’ll be able to take the fight back to his team-mate José María López, the reigning champion, Muller added:

“I hope so. Last year without the bad luck, I would have been closer to him. if you look at how many points I lost. In Marrakech I had a better start compared to my colleagues so I would have been first in that race, it was the same at Salzburg… In Japan I was behind him and catching him and then I had a puncture, so more bad luck, there are some years like this where you can’t do anything, so for me the season was over quite early, almost already gone after Marrakech.

“In terms of performance at the end of the season Pechito was a bit faster than me, but then I think I was not on my best level and for me somewhere the championship was already lost.”