Traffic causes bad starting position for Monteiro at Monza

Tiago Monteiro says he wasn’t able to show the true pace of the Honda today, after being blocked on his two fastest laps in qualifying. The Portuguese drive lines up 15th for both of tomorrow’s races in the new Civic.

In a frenetic qualifying session where track position in terms of gaining the slipstream off of the car in front was paramount, many drivers were caught out and ended up out of position on the grid.

After being second fastest with a time of 1:58.790 in the first practice session, Monteiro ended up down in P15 with a time of 1:59.155, just outside of the time of 1:59.044 that would have seen him make it into Q2.

“It was like the M25 at 8am,” said Monteiro to TouringCarTimes.

“The first set of tyres I did a decent lap, nothing crazy but nothing bad, but on the second set of tyres you get two laps and on the first I was blocked by two cars on each lap. I’m two-tenths off Q2 and I lose maybe seven-tenths or eight-tenths, so it’s not the performance of the car that I’m P15, it was just the way the pack worked out; two laps blocked and I’m out.

Though Honda have shown pace throughout practice, the pace of the Chevrolets, now all run effectively as independent teams with limited off-season testing or development has surprised the Honda driver, but says there’s still more to come.

“(The gap’s) a little bit more than expected,” he said. “We always said Monza would be difficult because of the straight-line speed, and we knew it was one of the toughest tracks for us. We didn’t know how much, but we need to work. We always knew there was going to be progression time. But forget my P15 time, Gabriele’s shown more the pace of the car.”