Craft-Bamboo Racing’s James Nash was at a loss to explain his and his team-mates average qualifying performances in the season opener for the TCR International Series in Georgia, with the Brit ending up in 11th on the grid.
Nash had been struggling to break into the top ten all day, only just managing a best position of tenth in second practice.
In qualifying, the 2016 championship runner-up failed to make any gains on his rivals, ending up over 1.5 seconds off the pace as he put his car in 11th on the grid for both of Sunday’s races.
“It’s really disappointing and as a team we’re very slow, so to salvage something from the weekend with a reverse grid pole would have been very good,” said Nash to TouringCars.Net. “My time got disallowed for a mistake I made – I understand that and take full responsibility and after that the tyres had gone so we couldn’t claw it back.
“Unfortunately, it was just so close and I missed out on P10. We have bad weekends and it’s not won or lost this weekend, so we just have to keep going, keep our heads down and try to pick off some places tomorrow.”
Nash believes that with home hero Kajaia being on pole by more than half a second, even with his local knowledge there may be an issue with the Balance of Performance [BoP] affecting the qualifying performance.
Despite that, Nash also acknowledged that he and the team have more work to do, as the SEAT of Ferenc Ficza was still a second faster in Q2.
“The point is that we all in our team are so far off the pace. I think there’s half a second to the next car from Davit, so I think there’s a BoP issue there.
“For our team to be half a second off the next SEAT is a problem for us. There’s something fundamentally wrong there. I have to say the car feels OK.
“[The circuit] is tough to drive and it’s fairly technical. The high-speed [corners] make it very difficult to get the car in the right direction, but it’s really no more difficult than some of the other circuits, so I really don’t understand why we would be so slow.
“Unfortunately, we’ve got no data to analyse against; we’ve got ourselves and we’re all within two or three tenths [of each other]. It’s Ficza’s data that we need to see, to see why we’re so slow.
“We’re used to being the fastest SEAT on the grid, we expect that, so we need to go and find it.”