Team Clairet Sport’s Teddy Clairet was delighted to claim his first pole position in TCR racing on his home circuit at Paul Ricard.
Clairet, who finished qualifying ahead of the four Sébastien Loeb Racing Hyundai Elantra’s to start race one of the weekend from pole position, also admitted his performance on Saturday morning has helped make up for a tough start to the season at the Slovakiaring three weeks ago.
The French driver will start race one of the second round of the TCR Europe season alongside reigning champion Mehdi Bennani after taking pole by 0.110 seconds.
“Qualifying was difficult because, as you could see, it was tight between everyone in Q2,” said Clairet.
“It’s my first pole position in TCR so I’m really happy about that because we’ve improved a lot since the first race in Slovakia.
“I’m really happy to come back here and to be on pole. I think we made the correct adjustments to the car, we know this track but we didn’t know that much about the tyres.
“It was a bad weekend for us three weeks ago and so we tried to learn from our mistakes in Slovakia. It’s going to be difficult looking after the tyres here, but it’s going to be the same for everyone. We will be pushing and then we will see.”
This weekend has also seen the Peugeot 308s of both Teddy and brother Jimmy Clairet being given a 10kg weight break following the the latest changes to the TCR balance of Performance (BoP) calculations.
Race one of the TCR Europe round at Paul Ricard takes place later today at 16:45 CEST (15:45 BST).