Target Competition announces immediate withdrawal from TCR Europe

Target Competition has announced its withdrawal from TCR Europe “effective immediately” during the ongoing race weekend at Paul Ricard in France, citing dissatisfaction over Balance of Performance as the reason for the decision.

The Italian team fields two Hyundai Elantra N TCRs in the series this season for drivers Dusan Borkovic and Marco Butti, with the pair qualifying eleventh and twelfth respectively this weekend.

The withdrawal of the team’s two cars brings the number of entered cars at Paul Ricard down from 14 to 12.

Target Competition issued the following statement after qualifying:

“We are sad to announce that the Target Competition team and its drivers will not participate in TCR Europe, effective immediately.

From the season opener in Portimao the category Balance of Performance (BoP) was very unfavourable for our cars. We tried our best as a team to overcome the performance gap on track this created.

We had great results in Pau, because the track was lacking straight where the effects of the BoP are particularly obvious, and our driver Borkovic did an amazing job driving over the weekend.

This decision didn’t come overnight, and it was a hard one.

After a poor qualifying session losing 2 seconds per lap, due to a combination of the poor BoP for our Hyundai Elantra N TCR cars, and 30kg of compensation weight for Borkovic, we decided to withdraw both cars from the competition.

It is not acceptable for our team and drivers to compete in this situation and it is not the racing conditions that we aim for.

We want to keep our reputation as a winning team, with winning drivers. We are open to returning to the series if a solution is presents, as promised at the beginning of the season.”