Honda drivers pleased with progress at Termas de Río Hondo

A relatively reliable weekend for the two Castrol Honda drivers in Argentina, with a second place finish for Gabriele Tarquini and two strong races for Tiago Monteiro sees the Honda team leave Argentina on a high after a few tough weekends.

Plagued with reliability issues last time out at Porto, things seemed to be heading that way again on Friday when the team were forced to change Tiago Monteiro’s engine which sent the Portuguese driver to the back of the grid for race one, but come qualifying the cars had good pace, helped in part by the additional 10kg in ballast the Italian team were allowed to remove from the cars for this weekend.

The ‘B-team’ car of Norbert Michelisz showed how good the Civic’s pace was securing third on the grid, with Tarquini fourth and Monteiro setting the seventh fastest time, securing fourth for the reverse grid race with his race one grid position already having been determined by the engine change.

In race one Tarquini finished just off the podium in fourth, chasing down Tom Chilton’s RML Chevrolet at the end with local hero José María López hot on his tail in the Wiechers-Sport BMW, whilst Monteiro put on a gallant charge to grab a solitary point for tenth from 22nd on the grid.

In race two, Monteiro had jumped to second, and Tarquini to fourth, but the Italian lost ground after a failed attack on the Nika Racing Chevrolet of Michel Nykajer, allowing RML’s Yvan Muller through into third position, where the Frenchman then caught and then made accidental contact with Monteiro at Turn 5 on lap five, sending Monteiro down to tenth and earning himself a drive through penalty, the cause of which both drivers still dispute.

With this, Tarquini was elevated to second but didn’t have the pace to stop ‘Pechito’ López claiming a heroic home win, whilst Monteiro battled back up to sixth, fighting with the identical Civic of Norbert Michelisz for fifth towards the chequered flag.

“(Race one was) very fun for me,” said Monteiro to TouringCarTimes. “I was strong right from the beginning, I recovered a lot of places on the first two laps and I kept going until I caught this pack of Michelisz, Huff and Nash, but then there was not enough laps.

“We learned a lot in the first race, so I think we did a good job. In the second race I had a great start, went to second place straight away and tried to gauge a little bit of the pace of Lopez to see what kind of level he could sustain during the race, (before the incident with Muller).”

On Honda’s performance over the weekend, the Portuguese driver was satisfied with the turnaround since Porto.

“We need to sort out first our reliability issues before we think of going faster. This weekend we’re not 100% trouble free, but it’s a lot better for both me and Gabriele. Gabriele had some little issues but nothing too crazy, so we need to keep on working on this and at the same time a bit of performance. We can see we’re still lacking a bit of top speed even though we’re lighter, so there’s still work to do.”

2009 champion Tarquini’s weekend saw him move back up to third position in the drivers’ standings coming to the South American continent in fifth, and so had reasons to smile after the race.

“We had some electronical problems (on Saturday) which we tried to solve on (Sunday) morning,” he said.

“The engine was quite good in race one, and race two and I had a good car with which to fight. It’s always very difficult with the Chevys, as the Chevy is really fast on the straight.

“In the second race I made a really great start and after two laps I tried to overtake (Michel) Nykjaer on the outside of the last corner but I was a little bit too optimistic and I lost two or three positions.

“Pepe (Oriola) was very fast behind me, so I tried not to think about first position as I was more concerned about my mirrors and fighting the Chevrolet.”

Honda now head to the Sonoma circuit in the USA next month, which is the last track on this year’s calendar where the team haven’t raced before.