Photo: RML Group

RML delighted with TC1 Cruze success in spite of limited testing

RML, in their first year in the WTCC as a car supplier and not running their own team, are hailing the success of the Chevrolet Cruze TC1 in the 2014 season, the only car which stopped Citroën taking a clean sweep of pole positions, as well as the only car to take a race win from a non-reversed grid.

The Cruze TC1 was developed over the off season, with two cars for the three customer teams, ROAL Motorsport, Campos Racing and Münnich Motorsport – all three making the switch to RML Chevrolets after having run BMWs & SEATs previously in the Championship.

The first Chevrolet RML Cruze TC1 was delivered to Campos Racing in March, just a few weeks before the first round of the Championship at Marrakech.

“(The lack of testing) cannot be underestimated,” said RML’s Chassis Engineering Head Mark Way. “We would have liked more time to ‘design in’ performance and more than just a few days of track time to optimise and learn the package. Testing during a race weekend is not ideal; you should only be tuning the car with known set up changes to optimise the car to the track on the day.

“I think it is a credit both to the design of the car and to the teams, how few technical issues we have had and how much progress with set up has been made.”

The team which won the WTCC drivers and manufacturer/teams’ titles between 2010 and 2013, had far more time to prepare the new generation 1.6 litre turbocharged engine which was introduced for the 2011 season. An evolution of this engine was used in the 2014 TC1 Cruze, but the chassis design was all new for this year.

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With Campos, ROAL and Münnich all having to shakedown and test their cars in just two weeks, the usual design cycle, compared for example to Citroën, which were testing their C-Elysée WTCC as early as June the previous year, was immensely truncated.

“Our normal design cycle would allow a single car to be built and tested. We would then iron out any reliability, operational and technical issues while continually adding performance updates,” said Way. “Only then do we sign off the car for production. For the launch of the RML Cruze TC1 we built six cars and had a minimum of three sets of spares committed before we had even turned a wheel. We had to manage this risk through the manufacturing process and work hard with our suppliers who were under immense pressure to include the engineering updates in all the sets of components they were manufacturing. To make this even more challenging, the first race was in Marrakech and some of the customers had significant damage,” he added, referring to Tom Coronel’s collision with the Proteam Honda in the second race.

Reflecting upon the highlights of the 2014 season, Way added:
“We go racing to win races (and that is what history will remember) so of course the first race win with the new car by Gianni Morbidelli in Hungary was special, but I actually took a lot of satisfaction from the first Q2 result in Marrakech where we had three cars ahead of the works Hondas. Beijing was another highlight when Tom (Chilton) dominated from pole to win comfortably.”

The Cruze will be back on the grid in 2015, while Citroën, Honda and Lada are already hard at work developing their factory-backed programmes. RML will continue to support customer teams in the WTCC, with Campos Racing having already been running with a number of upgrades in the latter part of 2014, with more to come.

“We have been working hard and have some performance upgrades planned. The teams are also co-ordinating their testing plans in February and we hope to take a role in supporting the engineering in these group tests,” said Way.

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