Campos Racing’s Hugo Valente says that he is ‘very happy’ with his best-ever World Touring Car Championship qualifying performance, after the Frenchman qualified in fifth at his home event.
Valente, who was also fastest of all in second practice, qualified in fifth position after making it through to Q3 for the first time in his WTCC career.
“It’s a good feeling. I’m happy that we made it into Q3 at this race. Firstly, because it’s in France so it’s better, but also in Marrakech we should have been in Q3 and we had some brake problems so we had to start in 12th,” said Valente to TouringCars.Net. “It’s obviously it’s better to make it into Q3 and start fifth tomorrow for both races – it’s always easier to start from the front than 12th!”
Valente admits that he feels that he had the pace to beat Honda’s Gabriele Tarquini, but not the trio of Citroën’s at the front of the field.
“It could have been P4 I think because my lap was pretty bad in Q3,” added Valente. “But at the end of the day whether it’s P4 or P5 doesn’t make much difference because I couldn’t have been any higher than Citroën.
“In second qualifying we tried something where we only put new tyres on the front and we kept the old tyres on the back, which was a bad idea – the balance of the car was not good so it didn’t make me feel confident. We tried adjusting the setup for Q3, for which we had four new tyres, and we didn’t make the right decision so the car was not very good in Q3 – especially compared to free practice where the car was amazing.”
Valente praised the quality of his new RML-built car, which has proven to be the next best on the grid behind the Citroën’s which had considerably more testing mileage than any other car.
“The car is great for sure – it’s the best of the rest,” admitted Valente. “Citroën have tested for so long – they have maybe eight months of testing behind them – so give us maybe four or five races and we can improve the performances of the car and then we’ll hopefully be able to fight them. They’re going to be a bit heavier as well at the next round in Budapest so we’ll see how that goes.
“I think the gap is already a bit closer than in Marrakech. If race-by-race we can reduce the gap by two or three tenths it should be good. I am happy about the car – they did a great job, RML and Campos, so I’m very happy.”