Yvan Muller says that he has built up his team’s FIA World Touring Car Cup (WTCR) entry from almost nothing over the past two months, adding that he had also tried to sign nephew Yann Ehrlacher.
Muller, a four-time WTCC champion, will be making his return to full-season touring car racing in 2018, after a year out, as his Yvan Muller Racing team enter a pair of Hyundai i30 N TCR cars.
The Frenchman told TouringCars.Net that his plans came together in a relatively short space of time during the off-season, with his return to the wheel being at the behest of one of his as-yet unannounced partners.
“I don’t think it’s a comeback,” said Muller. “I retired for a bit more than one year, but I was very busy and very pleased with my situation – I really enjoyed last year. I was not missing racing at all.
“But an opportunity came for my team to have two cars in WTCR, but one of the conditions, from my sponsors and my partners, is that I have to be in the car. My partners said that they were interested to go, but they want me in the car.
“I said OK, but I didn’t plan to come back at all. Initially my plan was to take Ehrlacher and [Thed] Björk, but then Ehrlacher found a seat [at Münnich Motorsport], and so I said OK, I’ll do it for my team. That’s why it’s not really a comeback – I am doing it to help my team go up.”
Muller insists that he is not interested in a title campaign or more statistics for himself in 2018, with the 48-year-old fully focussed on supporting his team.
“I don’t care about [wins] anymore. I don’t need to win, I want to win for the team, for me I don’t care. When you are a racing driver you are very selfish, but I would say in the last eight or ten years I was more enjoying sharing things with my team and my team-mate.
“Since I run my team I enjoy to share my experience with the young drivers, the mechanics and the engineers, and that is what I like now. If they win a race, I’m pleased for them but I don’t care. I don’t need to win myself. I have nothing to prove.
“Also, regarding my age, although I am not the oldest, I think I did my career – it will be normal now if somebody beats me. I think it would be abnormal if they didn’t beat me.”
When asked about the lack of sponsors names on the cars at the official WTCR test in Barcelona, Muller explained that some of his partners are not yet ready to announce their involvement with the team, as he hinted at an ‘alternative’ marketing partnership.
“We will know [the sponsors] soon,” added Muller. “The programme started two months ago, and two months ago I had nothing. OK I had a workshop, but I had no trucks, no staff, no cars or anything.
“So then I said ‘OK I need people’, so I took two additional guys into my team. Then I needed somebody with experience, so I said to Cyan [Racing] ‘you have guys, you don’t have much to do this year, are you interested?’ Then I phoned a guy at RML and asked him to come with me. It was going step-by-step like this.
“I have sponsors, partners and a big car seller who is involved in the project but doesn’t want to be on the car and we plan some other direction in the future.
“I think they like the challenge of the way I am doing this, and they wanted to share this. I said OK, listen, we will do something different, and instead of putting the name on the car, which in the end doesn’t help much, we will go in some other direction which will help them to do some marketing, which we will do in a different way.”