Rob Huff hoping on upgrades to turn around flagging Lada

With the wet race result from Paul Ricard as an exception, the new Lada Granta Sport has been struggling this season in the hands of 2012 champion Rob Huff and two-time BTCC champion James Thompson, both hoping that the Russian manufacturer will push forward with some upgrades soon in order to be able to fight with the pack.

So far the Lada hasn’t made it out of the first part of qualifying in the first three races of the year, and has also been stricken with the worst reliability of the four new cars, with Mikhail Kozlovskiy recording a double DNF in Hungary and Rob Huff the same in Morocco.

The high number of retirements in the second race in Morocco helped Kozlovskiy score a good result for the team with fifth, equalled by Rob Huff one race later in the wet conditions at Paul Ricard, but on overall pace, the Ladas are clearly behind the other three, with Huff and Thompson fighting over 11th and 12th positions in Hungary with Kozlovskiy in the pits.

“It’s really tough, but what can we do,” said Huff to TouringCarTimes. “One of the fundamental problems is time, we have four races in the space of five weeks which gives you the really the opportunity to do nothing, so we’re almost half way through the season before we get the opportunity to make something. Parts are being made but every time we go racing we’re finding different problems.

“We’re going to stay here to do some testing to try and understand the car a bit better, and then we’re pushing really hard for some development parts to come after Slovakia, as we’re staying there for a few days as well.”

On the performance of the car, Huff admits the Lada is in the worst situation at present, and the drivers are dependent on new parts and upgrades to come before the round at the Salzburgring at the end of the month.

“If it’s wet, then I think we become the third fastest car with maybe the fifth fastest driver in the wet, but the fundamental problem is that every area of the car needs to be worked on. It’s not that we’re just missing one piece, we’re missing a lot of the pieces, and this year the rules have changed to make the car an aerodynamic car, and we have almost no aerodynamics on our car, we have no downforce, and we can’t fight evenly or fairly with manufacturers that have, so that’s one thing that would be a huge step forward.

“The other problem is the weight of the car, as the car is now 65kg overweight, and that’s half a second or six-tenths straight away, we need to be realistic and get some high-level professionalism going on in what we’re doing. We need to make steps as quickly as possible, there’s no doubt the team are very eager to do that, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.”