Both Opel Astra OPC cars entered by Campos Racing and the Ford Focus RS entered by Proteam Racing suffered from technical issues, preventing their running in qualifying and the first race of the TCR International Series in Malaysia on Saturday.
Both of Campos Racing’s cars, driven by Igor Skuz and Jordi Oriola, are expected to be able to take the start in Sunday’s second race, with the engine overheating problems which hampered them on Friday and Saturday having reportedly been solved.
“We have designed and built on the spot bigger radiators, which we will fit this afternoon,” explained Team Manager Rubén Espín. “Given the very high temperatures, we preferred not to race today in order to avoid bigger issues, but we will be ready for tomorrow’s races.
“We still pay the price for a short preparation time ahead of this first event, but we hope to be in running order for Sunday’s race two.”
Meanwhile, the only Ford Focus RS represented on the grid, Prtoeam Racing’s car of Diego Romanini, has been withdrawn from the event. The car has suffered from a minor electrical problem on Friday, before developing gearbox problems in second free practice and qualifying.
Greg Simmonds from Onyx Engineering, who are building the TCR-spec Fords for customers this year, explained that the car has been withdrawn and will reappear at the next event with a new gearbox.
“In full respect of the TCR spirit we are using a production gearbox that is operated by a paddle-shift via an actuator,” said Simmonds. “Unfortunately the actuator proved defective and this resulted in downshifting problems; something we did not expect. We were not able to solve the problem here and decided to replace the gearbox with a racing unit before the next event in China.”
Race two takes place at 05:35 BST (06:35 CEST) on Sunday.