First visit to Hungary for the WTCC

The FIA World Touring Car Championship will make its first appearance in Hungary this weekend, a home race for 2010 rookie challenge winner Norbert Michelisz. The race will also see the appearance of SUNRED’s new 1.6 litre turbo for some of their drivers.

With five wins out of the first six races, Chevrolet will be looking for nothing less than another pair of victories from the Hungarian Formula 1 circuit. British driver Rob Huff has a healthy 36 point lead over team-mate and reigning champion Yvan Muller, whom is still chasing his first victory of the season.

The Frenchman will also be racing under threat of a 10 place grid penalty if the stewards deem he causes an incident similar to that which took out Alain Menu in race one at Monza.

“I really don’t know much about the track and what they say about being a narrow track where overtaking is difficult may be true for F1 but not necessarily for touring cars, so we will see,” said Muller.

“I will be arriving earlier and will devote Wednesday to explore the circuit, by bike and on foot.”

Alain Menu has the slight advantage of having raced at the circuit before, in the FIA GT Championship back in 2001 with Rickard Rydell in a Prodrive-run Ferrari 550, but the race only lasted a couple of laps.

The crowds attention will be on local hero Norbert Michelisz, who recognises the RML Chevrolet Cruzes will be hard to beat, even with the home advantage.

“I would like to extract the most out of myself in front of my home crowd but so far my impression has been that Chevrolet are driving in another world and they also have three excellent drivers,” said Michelisz.

“It will be a good result to be in the top 5 but my secret aim is to get onto the podium in one of the races.”

SUNRED Engineering will finally debut their new 1.6 litre turbocharged engine this weekend. Developed by SUNRED and Lehmann, the engine has been testing all week, with the team pleased with the results. The team has decided however to just introduce it this weekend with their Yokohama Independents’ Championship drivers, and allow their top two championship contenders, Tiago Monteiro & Gabriele Tarquini to continue with the tried and tested TDI engine.

The move means the drivers with the 1.6 turbo will have to run the additional 40kg of new-entry penalty ballast, whilst SUNRED’s championship challengers will still run at base weight with the TDI engine, which shouldn’t be as much of a disadvantage compared to the turbos in Hungary as it was at Curitiba and Monza.

“We have already driven the new car and we know that its engine is more powerful, but its reliability is not yet ideal,” said Monteiro, currently fourth in the championship.

“Therefore, we think that for reliability reasons and so as not to jeopardize the good results we have been obtaining so far with the León TDI, it’s better to rely on it once again in Budapest.”

The team’s will get a 30 minute test at the circuit this afternoon at 14:00 CET, with Rounds 7 & 8 taking place back-to-back on Sunday from 12:20 CET.