Gianni Morbidelli upset with driving standards in race two

Münnich Motorsport driver Gianni Morbidelli rues the loss of a potential top five finish at the Paul Ricard circuit, after the Italian was knocked into a spin at the Chicane Nord, dropping him down the order from which he recovered to ninth in the Chevrolet RML Cruze TC1.

Morbidelli had qualified seventh overall for race one, but in the wet conditions, and with no warm-up this year for the drivers to acclimatise, the car fell down the order. In the second race, Morbidelli started from fourth on the grid, but was punched into a spin at the chicane by ROAL’s Tom Chilton, which caused chaos behind, holding up Citroën’s Yvan Muller and the Zengõ Honda of Norbert Michelisz.

“The first race was quite bad for me, as I didn’t have any experience in the wet, but I also made mistake with the set-up,” admitted Morbidelli to TouringCarTimes. “When I first went out I felt the car was oversteering, so I asked to modify the rear but it was a big mistake as I couldn’t turn in anymore and was not fast enough. So I started well, but I lost a lot of positions as the understeer was huge.”

“In the second race, I was just unlucky as (Tom) Chilton just put me out. I think they are just too aggressive, they just think about the first or second corner. I was able to overtake without having to put out other guys, but Chilton and also (Hugo) Valente, they just don’t wait enough and just crash into you. If this is the method to do these kinds of races, I will update my methods, but I don’t think it’s correct,” he said.

The Münnich Motorsport team are also playing catch-up development wise to the Campos and ROAL teams, who received their cars slightly earlier and have also put in place a full programme for the season.

Due to the lateness of the deal, both Münnich and Morbidelli were operating without race engineers in France, as their usual staff were already contracted to work for teams in the British Touring Car Championship, which clashes at the Hungarian round as well.

Morbidelli’s engineer at Marrakech was John Waterman, previously Alain Menu’s engineer at RML up to 2011, and now working with Sam Tordoff in the BTCC at Triple Eight, but with no engineer at Paul Ricard, Morbidelli was only able to rely on informal advice from RML’s support staff, including Yvan Muller’s former engineer Chris Cronin.

“We need more mileage. We need to work much more to find the right set-up. From my point of view, I need to work with an engineer which at this moment we don’t have,” he added.

“I just had some good information from Chris from RML, but just a friendly suggestion, but this isn’t the method to work. And then we need to test eventually to improve further.

“The first two races for us our just testing, so that now means we have to try and do better from Budapest, but it’s hard as you only have three 30 minute practices before qualifying, and it’s not really enough time to learn the car.”