Félix Porteiro wants to take the independents title

Felix Porteiro has no regrets after loosing his works drive at BMW Team Italy-Spain. The Spaniard moved to the privateer team Proteam shortly ahead of the 2009 season. While many expected the Spaniard to perform well, the results of the first two races speak for themselves: four wins out of four in the independents championship.

“Valmiro Presenzini created a team that feels more like a family than any other team I’ve been in, the people are very friendly and it feels like a big family, which makes our job easier,” said Porteiro.

“The only thing that makes Proteam different from a works team is the budget, but they have the same ability of a manufacturer supported structure. I would really love to see what they’d be able to do with the same budget as Roal, as with half the budget compared to BMW Team Italy-Spain they can field such a competitive car.”

When asked about the difficulties of finding himself in an independent team, the Spaniard said that:

“Of course the lack of budget prevents us from doing tests, which is the biggest disadvantage we have compared to the works teams. While they do 15-40 days of tests, we have no testing days scheduled for this year. Because of that, we have to experiment on the racing weekends, which means we can make mistakes and waste precious time, while works teams can use the solutions they tested before. Nevertheless, we seem to be very close in terms of performances with my previous works team.”

When asked about the reasons why he had to leave BMW Team Italy-Spain, Porteiro feels that it was quite a simple reason for it.

“BMW Spain cut the budget by 50% due to the global crisis, which meant they needed a paying driver to fill the gap between last year’s and this year’s budget. It was as simple as that.”

At first it looked like the Spaniard would head off to the new Campos team and drive a Honda Accord in the WTCC 2009.

“When BMW signed with Hernandez, Chevrolet and Seat had already confirmed their lineups, so at that moment Campos was my only chance to race in WTCC 2009. In the end, Campos didn’t manage to find the budget for the whole season. So when Proteam came in with a chance of racing with a highly competitive car, I was glad to accept the deal.”

When asked if he hopes to leave Proteam at the end of this year to be a works driver again, Porteiro showed how good he feels in the Tuscany-based team:

“To be honest, I would love to have both. I’d be glad if Proteam became a works team, BMW would be perfect but I’m sure that other manufacturers would be happy to have Presenzini’s team in. I believe they’re ready for the challenge.”

After the cracking start of the season, Porteiro has got high hopes for the rest of the year.

“I have three goals: the first one is to win the independents championship, then being closer and closer to the works BMW’s and growing as a driver. As this is only my third season in touring cars, so I believe I still have a lot to learn.”

When the Spaniard is not behind the wheel of his Proteam BMW 320si E90 he likes to stay fit with other sports.

“Of course, open wheel cars require a lot more training. To keep myself fit, I run on foot and with the bike, I play football and work in the gym, as well as doing karting, which is something I still love. The real difficulty of touring cars, anyway, is the high temperature of the cockpit.”

Porteiro is now off for an holiday in Columbia, since he doesn’t have any tests to do before the Marrakech event.