Target Competition’s Dušan Borković was pleased with his performance in the opening TCR Europe contest at the Red Bull Ring, progressing from 14th on the grid to finish sixth at the flag.
The Serbian racer had scored only a handful of points in the two previous rounds at the Hockenheimring and at Spa-Francorchamps, but was pleased to be able to make up eight positions en route to sixth in race one.
He told TouringCars.Net he thought tenth was a realistic result heading into the race and was happy to exceed his expectations, especially by pipping former team-mate Davit Kajaia by just six-thousandths at the finish line.
“I don’t know how I did that but I did it,” said Borković.
“We’re missing the top speed but I did something I didn’t know I could. Everybody asked me ‘OK you were bad in qualifying, can you do something in the race?’
“I said ‘No way!’ I thought maybe P10 I could achieve but P6 is great.
“In the last corner I had a nice fight with [Davit] Kajaia, he’s my good friend and old team-mate. I overtook him in the last corner, and it was only 6 thousandths of a second at the flag.”
Making his first visit to the Spielberg circuit this weekend, Borković admitted a mixture of mistakes on his part and unfortunate circumstances resulted in a poor qualifying result.
“It was not my morning – not the whole day – just the morning,” he said. “I haven’t driven this circuit ever before so I don’t have a lot of knowledge out there.
“In qualifying I didn’t know how much I could push. On the first set of tyres I overdrove a bit, so in corner three I was completely out on the gravel.
“I destroyed the tyres, there was a big flatspot. So I couldn’t make the lap time because the car was completely unstable. Then there was a yellow flag, then I put on new tyres and there was a red flag!
“When you only have one lap and you’re P29, I just had to do an average stupid lap because the track limits are dangerous here.
“In the first sector I lost half a second or something like that just from my team-mate, then I just finished the lap, so I was out of Q2.”
Despite this, Borković was buoyed by his pace after setting the fastest lap before the safety car was released, a feat he described as “unbelievable” given he was battling in the middle of the pack.
“I saw my real pace in the race because in the race I had the same lap time as my qualifying which is unbelievable,” Borković said.
“And I had the same pace as Luca Filippi and Josh Files, while fighting in P13, not at the front. The pace was there, I overtook a lot of cars. It was fair fighting with everybody, I didn’t do any bad behaviour and nobody was bad to me.
“It was really quite a good race for me, just missing the qualifying made it difficult. I’m sad because I think tomorrow if I started from a good position I could easily win.”
The TCR Europe second race of the weekend is set to get underway at 11:30 CEST tomorrow [14 July].