Photo: Mediaempire

Johan Kristoffersson hopes to be on the pace of Volvo by the end of the season

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The new PWR Racing SEAT León struggled on its debut with limited testing at the Skövde airport race, but the 2012 STCC champion, back for the first time and with the Solution F concept, says the team can catch the dominant Volvo though it may not be until the end of the season.

Kristoffersson collected a good haul of points with fourth in Race 1 and fifth in Race 2 to leave the circuit fifth in the championship standings, albeit 42 points behind points leader Robert Dahlgren in the Polestar Cyan Racing Volvo S60, though Kristoffersson, whose STCC programme takes place alongside his World Rallycross Championship commitments, said the first weekend was quite a struggle due to the lack of testing.

“Honestly, we’ve struggled all weekend,” he said to TouringCarTimes. “Practice was OK, but from there we’ve been struggling. We’ve had no confidence in the brakes, I don’t know what it is. We’ve been changing master cylinders and everything trying to find something, we’ve also been trying to improve the set-up of the car between the sessions but when you don’t have any brake confidence it’s really difficult to give some comments on the car on what I’d like to do.

“I’d like to start to push more, but as soon as I start to push the car decides not to agree and locks up, so I decided before the first race to take it easy and stay out of trouble and be smart, drive clever and not do like all the others.”

Despite the struggles at Skövde, the 27-year-old was full of praise for the efforts of the team to have prepared the three SEAT Leóns for the season opener, with the whole programme being put together at the last minute.

“The team have been working so hard during the last weeks to even get the cars on the track, so there’s a lot of work to do on the cars before we can get them into the condition for racing, but you cannot blame the guys as they have been working so hard, day and night the last two weeks to even get three cars,” he said.

“(But) compared to the Volvo guys, they have everything under control, so it’s going to be very difficult to compete against them, but as a driver it’s nice to start from the bottom, sort things out and maybe at the end of the season we’ll be there to at least fight with them a bit.”