LADA Sport Lukoil drivers Rob Huff and James Thompson admit to struggling with weight and aerodynamic problems on their TC1 Grantas, with none of the team’s three drivers making it into Q2 in Hungary.
Huff was the best-placed of the LADA drivers, qualifying in 12th position on Saturday. The 2012 champion was disappointed to have missed out on entry into Q2 by just 0.347 seconds.
“I was disappointed not to get into the top 12 because we went out early and did three good runs,” said Huff to TouringCars.Net. “We were sitting in ninth and tenth for most of the session and just got pipped at the end.
“At the end of the day we just haven’t got the speed. The mechanical balance of the car is pretty good, but you’ve only got to look at the car from the outside to realise we’ve got a lot of work to do, especially where aero is concerned.”
Huff explained that the team plan to stay in Hungary ahead of the next race in Slovakia in order to carry out further testing of the new car, which is unable to benefit from the 60 kilo reduction in compensation weight due to being fundamentally overweight in the first place.
“We’re staying here this week to do some testing and we’re staying in Slovakia after the race,” explained Huff. “We’ve got some new parts coming for the car and some updates. But the only data from testing we’ve done is effectively the race weekends so far.
“Ultimately at the moment the base package that we’ve got simply isn’t good enough. We’ve got a lot of updates, but a lot of the parts on our car are homologated and they’re potentially things that you can’t change without using the waivers and the jokers. We need to be very clever in how and where we use those jokers and make sure we get them right on the car.
“Unfortunately the problem that we’ve got with the car is that it’s simply not light enough either. Effectively we can’t take the weight out of the car. It’s the smallest chassis but I think a bit of a miscalculation along the way in the design and build of the car means that we can’t get down to the [base weight] – we’re running 60 kilos over the weight limit now effectively, so there’s half a second straight away.”
Huff’s experienced team-mate Thompson echoed his fellow Brits views, adding that problems with stepping up to a three-car team, for example, has only added to the list of things to deal with in 2014.
“It’s been a disappointing start,” admitted Thompson to TouringCars.Net. “The reality of it is that going to three cars, with the change of regulations and the timescale, presented a lot of problems for the team to do deal with. Unfortunately we’re still dealing with them – it’s the third meeting and we’ve still got problems.
“It’s been very frustrating, I’m not going to lie. We’ve taken the positives – Mikhail [Kozlovskiy] had a fantastic fifth place [in Marrakech] and Rob had a great race in Paul Ricard and they equal the best-ever results for LADA. So whilst we know we’re much more off the pace than we ever were last year, we have equalled our best results, so those are the positives. I’m a bit more of a realist and say that we have got a huge amount of work to do and unless we do it we’re going to stay where we are.”
Thompson, who has had problems with the steering rack on his car this weekend, adds that he is disappointed with the way the season is progressing considering the form displayed in 2013.
“We had aspirations of grandeur after last year,” added Thompson, who scored a best finish of fifth in Russia. “Even with our car as it was last year, by the end of the season we were genuinely fighting for the top twelve. We were on the cusp a lot of times last year. You make your own luck, but we were pretty unlucky not to have a better result than fifth.
“This year is a different story – we were given freedom of design and the same width and the same rules as everybody else. The reality of what was designed and brought across here from Russia, with the best will in the world, unfortunately we’re three seconds off the pace and we can’t even take advantage of the 60 kilo reduction in weight.”