Photo: WTCC Media

Gabriele Tarquini completes shakedown run in FP0

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Castrol Honda’s Gabriele Tarquini completed what was effectively a shakedown run for his new Civic in the first test session a Paul Ricard. Tarquini’s car has been rebuilt in the aftermath of his crash last week in Morocco in the. The Italian was forced to abort running in today’s session early after a gearbox installation issue was identified during the test.

Tarquini ended the session tenth fastest, 1.8 seconds down on the lap time of pace setter José María López’s Citroën C-Elysée, and admitted he was lucky to be able to get any running today after the damage last weekend.

“It was like a shakedown, it’s quite normal to find something that doesn’t work,” said Tarquini to TouringCarTimes. “We had small issue with the installation of the gearbox, and the gearbox was not working well, so I decided to stop after a few laps.

“But I’m really happy about the work of the team, over the last three days they’ve worked night and day to finish on time and to give me the opportunity to make this Free Practice 0, as on the plan it was not clear if I would run in Free Practice 0, as only tonight the car was to be finished, and they finished one day earlier than the plan.

With Honda closer to the pace of Citroën in the first session, with Norbert Michelisz within a second of López, and Tarquini’s team-mate Tiago Monteiro up in seventh, the gap between the field looks closer than at last weekend’s race, but the Italian says it’s too early to judge at the moment.

“I’m not watching too deeply yet the lap times,” he said. “Free Practice 0 is always very difficult to judge the performance. Chevrolet have never tested here, and we spent one fully day in the dry, so it’s sure that we have a small advantage to them at the moment over Marrakech.”

JAS Motorsport Team Principal Alessandro Mariani praised the work of the team’s mechanics, who have been working for for three days straight to repair the car.

“I take my hat off to our boys,” said Mariani. “Now that this hard, almost impossible challenge has been met, we can focus on our primary task, which are the preparations for the second meeting of the FIA WTCC on the Circuit Paul Ricard. We completed one of our recent test sessions on this track, so we should feel well at home.”