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James Thompson overjoyed with change around in performance

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LADA Sport Lukoil’s James Thompson qualified in seventh place for the first race at Porto, which was a welcome surprise after the car struggled in free practice, finishing 21st and then 19th in the two sessions.

Thompson set the 11th fastest time in Q1, which saw him move into Q2 for the fight for pole position, where the Lada set a time originally recorded as the fifth fastest, but was later discovered to be the seventh quickest time after an revised after a timing error was corrected adjustment by the official timekeepers.
“I’m totally over the moon. That comes as massive save to be honest,” said Thompson to TouringCarTimes. “(In free practice) we were nowhere, then Marco (Calovolo, Thompson’s race engineer) waves his magic wand.”

“After Free Practice 1 we knew we were in trouble. We came here with the same car as Moscow as we thought why change something after you had your best result, and then in Free Practice 1 it was impossible to drive. Because we had such a short space of time between sessions we couldn’t change very much so in session two it was also a disaster.”

Thompson was able to get through into Q2 but with the extra runs in Q1, had to adopt an alternative strategy in the second part of qualifying, only heading out when the teams had their second run after a brief red flag stoppage.

“The last run was really good, I followed the other cars, got a little bit of a slipstream. We didn’t have many tyres left…so (in Q2) we had one run left just like the old BTCC days.”

Thompson’s lap was all out for pace, and whether he thought he should have gambled and aimed for a better starting position for the reversed grid race, Thompson said:
“We take every result, you can’t rely on race two. Yes it would be fantastic to have pole position and lead a race and try to defend and maybe we can win, but if we had an accident in race one, race two doesn’t matter, so I’d prefer to take fifth [now revised to seventh] position and have nice people all around us.”