Photo: WTCC Media

Power steering issues hamper Thompson’s progress

By

A power steering failure for Lada Sport’s James Thompson saw the Briton qualify in 17th place at Portimão, after a top ten showing earlier on in free practice.

The Lada Sport team are at Portimão for their second appearance of the season with the new Lada Granta Sport. The car again showed strong pace with its 1.6 litre ORECA-built engine as it had in Hungary, but continuing electrical issues, this time with the power steering, have hurt the team’s progress on Saturday.

“First this morning the new power steering system was working very well, but in the second session it died and we went into qualifying exactly as we had finished the second session as we couldn’t make it work,” said Thompson to TouringCarTimes.

“It’s really hard work and obviously I’m not in total control of the car. If you hit a kerb you’d be hanging on to it for fear of death.”

“We changed the drive train to try and deal with it by freeing off the braking, otherwise you just physically wouldn’t be able to drive it at all. So we’ve sort of compromised performance so at least I can actually drive it, but trying to do a race distance is going to be hellish. I’m having to turn in very early because it’s takes me physically a long time to actually get the car into the corner.”

Thompson was tenth fastest in the first free practice session, but with the power steering failing in FP2, lost half a second of pace and dropped to 19th, but still managed to pull back a 1:55.926 in qualifying to finish 1.1 seconds down on the top time in Q1 of Gabriele Tarquini, but with the field so close that was only good enough for 17th on the grid.

“The speed’s there, you don’t do the first part of qualifying and be eighth without it being there,” added Thompson. “Realistically our pace is around the top ten. If you look in the first free practice when things were working well we were tenth, in the first run (in qualifying) with a good run we were eighth, so I think we would be in that area where we’re about getting into Q2.”