José María López delighted to open Citroën’s account with pole

Although Yvan Muller and Sébastien Loeb topped the time sheets in every practice session up to qualifying, it was 30-year-old José María López who outperformed his two World Champion team-mates in qualifying, capitalising on a rare error by Yvan Muller to take pole position in Marrakech.

During the new three part qualifying format, Yvan Muller was the first to go out and set his flying lap after setting the third fastest time in Q2, and though the Frenchman set the best times of anyone in the first and sector sectors, a mistake at the second chicane, forcing him to cut it

“I made a mistake at Turn 9, I overbraked and locked the front axle and went straight on,” said Muller after qualifying, though his time was still good enough for second on the provisional grid.

New team-mate José María López was elated to grab pole on only his second WTCC weekend, having won on his first appearance at Termas de Río Hondo last year with Wiechers-Sport.

“It’s amazing. If you see behind be I have 13 World Champions, but thanks to the team, we have a really good car,” said López to TouringCarTimes.

“I started yesterday in a kind of safe mode. For the team it’s very important to bring the car to the end, as we don’t have many spare parts, and the next race is just six days away. Even then, I made a mistake this morning and hit the kerb a little bit too heavily and damaged the car and I lost a bit of time compared with Seb and Yvan, and lost a bit of confidence.

“I decided to be careful and accept that even if I’m P3 it’s OK, and I approached qualifying like that so I tried not to make any mistakes, I knew that I was losing time a little bit in sector three, so I tried to push a little bit more there…and then the team told me I was P1 which is a great feeling.”

Looking ahead to tomorrow’s races, López will start from pole position for race one and tenth for the reversed grid second race, behind his two Citroën team-mates, and knows the reverse grid will be the main challenge.

“I know the strongest point of Yvan is driving through the field, and I know Seb doesn’t have that much experience but so far he has been surprising everyone,” said López.

“We’ve been quite quick compared to the other cars, so I think we just have to take our time, do a good start and then just start to work through the field if we can.

In terms of team orders, López says they’re free to race at the moment, but to focus on bringing home the best result for the team.

“Of course we will be fighting as we’re so close, but the priority is the team, which is to make sure we finish in front. This advantage we have on the rest maybe just for this race and may not be there at the next one.”