Yvan Muller has admitted that he was surprised to have taken pole position in qualifying for the World Touring Car Championship at the Slovakiaring, his first of the season.
Having struggled to feature in the top ten during Saturday morning’s first two practice sessions, Muller increased his pace steadily throughout qualifying to secure a 29th career pole position.
Given that Citroën are carrying 80 kg more compensation weight than their competitors, Muller joked that he was particularly surprised to have scored pole.
“If my engineers tell me I could have gone even quicker on my Q3 lap, there’ll be trouble,” laughed Muller. “I am as surprised as anyone by my time, but it is in line with the simulations we had done.
“I was pretty sceptical after free practice, but it turns out the engineers were right once again. They urged me to attack a little more, to try and shave off valuable hundredths on the turns and in my line…
“I’m even surprised at that time. But I felt from inside it was a great lap. Every point where I had some gain to do during the qualifying, I gained it for the Q3. There’s no such thing as a perfect lap, but this one wasn’t far off.”
Citroën Racing Team Principal Yves Matton added that the team had calculated they were in with a shot of pole position, despite the ballast and their slow pace during practice.
“According to the calculations done by our engineers in the run-up to this weekend, we were in with a shot of winning pole position, give or take a few tenths of a second,” said Matton. “To achieve that, everyone would have to do a flawless job… and that’s exactly what happened! For the drivers, the difficulty was ignoring their times from free practice and trying to work out how the car would handle once they put on fresh tyres.
“Yvan put in an exceptional performance that was just reward for the whole team. Thanks to a great run by Mehdi Bennani, we also scored maximum points in MAC3, which is very satisfying.”