Gianni Morbidelli: “We expected more of course”

Gianni Morbidelli was left unhappy with the results of the weekend in Georgia as he struggled to extract the pace from the new Volkswagen Golf GTI TCR, finishing tenth and seventh in the day’s two races.

Morbidelli qualified in seventh and dropped to tenth at the start of Race 1 and stayed there for the majority of the race.

For Race 2, he was running as high as fifth, but kept slipping back as he struggled for pace, crossing the line ninth, but was promoted to seventh after the penalties for Hugo Valente and Roberto Colciago.

“We must be realistic, it’s not enough,” said Morbidelli to TouringCarTimes. “We expected a little bit more of course. We knew the difficulties you can have with a new car, but this doesn’t mean that you have to finish tenth or ninth.

“We’ve struggled a lot with understeer, and I was not able to fight…we were a little bit surprised as this morning in the wet the car was quite good, but then in Race 1 with just a few changes, the car was totally different.

“In the dry (in Race 2), again I felt the car was understeering too much and couldn’t be on the game with the others, and they just overtook me very easily.”

The team has two weeks until the next race at Bahrain, and Morbidelli hopes the team can get to the bottom of the set-up issues.

“We have to understand what happened here. Yesterday, I was happy because our performance was similar to (WRT Volkswagen’s Jean-Karl Vernay), but in the races today we weren’t able to do 10% of what he did, so if he is my reference at the moment, we were far.”