Tiago Monteiro says the new Honda has more unlocked potential

Castrol Honda Racing Team JAS driver Tiago Monteiro believes there’s more to come from the new Honda Civic WTCC, after finishing fifth in race one in Marrakech and running as high a second in race two until he was forced to stop with a broken floor.

The Portuguese driver was the only works Honda in the race after the withdrawal of Gabriele Tarquini, whose car was heavily damaged in FP2 on Saturday.

Monteiro made a good start and was up to fifth at the start of race one, though he was passed by the Campos Racing Chevrolet of Dusan Borkovic on lap four but regained the position when Borkovic received a time penalty post-race.

In race two, Monteiro avoided the trouble at the start between Proteam’s Mehdi Bennani and ROAL’s Tom Coronel and was up to second, but with a damaged underside he slowly fell down the order and was eventually given a mechanical black flag by the stewards as the car was shedding debris on to the circuit.

“The result is what it is, but we have to take the positives out of that and we learned,” said Monteiro to TouringCarTimes. “We understood some of the small issues that we had throughout the weekend, so you’re always evolving, always learning.

“Now we need time. We need to keep on doing our development work. We really discovered some important areas this weekend, it was actually like a live test. The result could have been better, but then it could have been worse. It was difficult to start with just one car, it is a shame what happened to Gabriele.”

Monteiro also commented on the apprarent flagility of the new TC1 cars, with the two Hondas both losing their rear bumpers in race one, and with both Monteiro and ROAL’s Tom Chilton suffering with broken flat floors in the race which scattered carbon fibre shrapnel on to the track.

“In my case, the hit from Borkovic was quite hard, I lost the bumper but it wasn’t a slight push, so you would expect it. There are a lot more aerodynamic parts, so when you touch you see more parts going off and all of those parts are carbon, last year it was a lot more metal.”

Honda Europe Motorsport Manager William De Braekeleer was optimistic following the race, with the Honda Civic gathering pace throughout the weekend and still believes they will be able to close down the gap to Citroën.

“We’re disappointed to lose one car, but we made good progress on Saturday when Gabriele found a very good change in the set-up of the car, and we’ll try that in Le Castellet,” he said to TouringCarTimes. “We won’t make up the difference to Citroën in Le Castellet, but we may be a more consistent second.”

The team now have a battle on their hands to repair Gabriele Tarquini’s Civic before the next weekend which begins in just three days at Le Castellet. The car left the circuit on Saturday to head to Paul Ricard early, where a spell shell is being delivered so the JAS Motorsport team can re-shell the car before testing on Friday at 12:30 CET.

The team are covering the progress of the repair on a special section of their Facebook page ahead of the race.