Hugo Valente picks up 1,000 EUR fine for abandoning his car

Campos Racing’s Hugo Valente was the only driver to receive a penalty of any kind after the WTCC’s debut at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, when the French driver added insult to injury when he collected a 1,000 EUR fine after abandoning his car after crashing out on lap two.

The 22-year-old had lost time at the start due to a clutch issue, making contact with Norbert Michelisz’s Honda who was able to pass the Chevrolet driver down the inside into Turn 1.

Valente then was involved in contact with Citroën’s Ma Qing Hua and Lada’s Rob Huff, which saw Huff retire with broken suspension. Recovering from outside of the top ten, Valente made his way up to ninth place before spinning the car on the Grand Prix circuit at Turn 10, collecting the wall with his Cruze sustaining heavy damage to the right-hand side.

Valente then left his car and returned to the pits, leaving the marshals struggling to figure out how to move the Cruze TC1 car, in breach of an instruction given to the drivers at the briefing on Thursday.

“Non-respect of the instructions from the race director in his briefing note 4.2 – Drivers retiring on the track must remain in the vicinity of their car,” read the offence listed by the FIA stewards, with the detail of the case stating:
“After the incident at T10 the driver did not stay near the car to help recovery operations. He left the car, crossed the track and walk away.”

The damage to Valente’s Cruze will require a lot of work, with the team now sending the car straight back to their base at Martorell near Barcelona to be repaired for the next round at the Moscow Raceway in three weeks. The damage costs for the #7 Chevrolet are already excessively, probably second only to Lada, following two high-speed front-end damage crashes for Valente at the opening round in Argentina.