Tom Chilton best of the rest and breaks the Citroën top three

ROAL Motorsport’s Tom Chilton has qualified third for the first round of the 2014 FIA World Touring Car Championship, following the removal of Yvan Muller’s time from Q3, and is happy to have been the best placed of the Chevrolet pack on Saturday.

Chilton was the first driver to try out the new one-lap shootout format in qualifying, setting a time of 1:44.864, the best time set by any Chevrolet Cruze all weekend and was just 1.1 seconds off of José María López’s Q3 pole position time.

“I did do quite a nice lap at the end there. The circuit was getting hotter, so it was getting slower, so I was happy I went quicker,” said Chilton to TouringCarTimes. “It’s a shame Borkovic didn’t go out at the right point as I’d like to have seen how many tenths or hundredths we were apart, because we were actually quite close, I’d like to think I’d have had the edge of course, but we were quite close.”

The 29-year-old remarked that the track conditions had changed significantly since practice, even though the ultimate pace was faster in qualifying, it was probably not as much as expected as the circuit was at its hottest.

“On my first lap in Q1, I locked up and went straight on at Turn 1, but I’d braked at exactly the same place as I did in practice, even now with better brakes and fresh rubber, and just locked up because the circuit was just 20 degrees hotter, I had no grip,” he said.

Looking at the performance of the day, Chilton’s happy to be the top Chevrolet driver and to have secured third on the grid after former team-mate Yvan Muller’s error, but concurs that at the moment, everyone else is in a different class to the factory Citroën team.

“I’d love to say I get top three on time, but the reality is I can only get top three if one of (Citroën’s) boys makes a mistake, they’re definitely down the road, we were absolutely flat out. They’ve done a great job, but with the amount of testing they’ve done they should be that quick. And actually we’ve done a really good job considering we’ve done no testing and the car’s completely different.”

Looking ahead to the two races, where Chilton will start third for race one and provisionally eighth for race two, he’s cautious that not damaging the car is key due to the amount of spare parts that have been used this weekend repairing team-mate Tom Coronel and Münnich Motorsport driver Gianni Morbidelli’s cars.

“Around here, it’s not a normal circuit, and around here if you do overtaking manoeuvres you’re putting your life at risk, and we have not one spare part left,” he added.