Zanardi “I never thought SEAT were so strong”

Alessandro Zanardi finished 12th and 14th in the first two races of the FIA World Touring Car Championship 2009. The Italian admits he did not expect SEAT to be so dominant again.
“Nor myself neither my brand-mates would have ever imagined such a strong performance from our rivals of SEAT,” said Zanardi on his homepage.

The high expectations Zanardi had before the race were put to test. But despite his modest results, he congratulates SEAT on their performance.

“My natural optimism has been put to the test by Curitiba’s weekend. We have to sportively send them our compliments and take our hats off and all the discussions on the fact that Curitiba is at 1000mt on the sea level and therefore this penalyzes our aspirated engines are worthless,” said Zanardi.

Thanks to the high altitude of the Curitiba raceway in Brazil, the SEAT’s are not suffering as badly as the normally aspirated engines of BMW, Chevrolet and Lada because of the turbo charger.

“Tarquini, Yvan Muller, Gene and company were flying both on straights and corners and they deserve the merit for this,” said Zanardi.

Despite the domination of SEAT, Zanardi keeps faith in his BMW.

“Despite all difficulties, I am proud for representing BMW in a championship that has always seen our brand as protagonist. I am strongly convinced that they will wisely react to organize the right sportive counter-charge,” said Zanardi.

WTCC heads to Mexico for the second race weekend of the year in little under two weeks. But Zanardi does not think BMW will be back on top there.

“It is fairly unlikely that this is gonna happen since the next race, since the Mexican round of Puebla has never brought anything good in terms of our car’s performances.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that starting from the third race at Marrakech, we will have the material to be back among the protagonists and, I hope I can be one of the most representative standard-bearer of our “group counter-charge,” said Zanardi.