Sergey Afanasyev: “Tomorrow’s races will be a mess!”

Sergey Afanasyev made remarkable progress from this morning’s struggles up to being the quickest Craft-Bamboo Lukoil driver in Qualifying. The Russian praised the team effort behind such an improvement.

“I made progress thanks to my engineer and the mechanics, who helped me set up the car to my liking,” said the SEAT driver to TouringCarTimes. “The car was sliding a lot this morning, I had lots of oversteer, but this was helpful in a way, just as this circuit, which is really helping my learning process. It is teaching me that it is not so scary to go sideways with this car. I feel I can control the car now. Between Q1 and Q2 we also made a few changes and I was able to improve even more.”

Despite a positive performance, Afanasyev is under no illusion this weekend will be simple to face: “Overall it’s not going to be an easy weekend. I lost a lot of points during the last few races, I am still getting used to the tough fights required to compete at a high level in touring cars. I am going to push flat out and keep learning.”

Talking about tomorrow’s races, the Russian said: “The goal is to collect points. I want to push really hard, but from my point of view the Hondas are just uncatchable, so it would be okay if they went away and we fought.”

Despite a strong performance from Zengo Motorsport’s Dániel Nagy, Afanasyev did not praise him, but instead warned him about how tough the races are going to be: “I don’t know him, but to be honest it will be dangerous for him. He’s like the hunted in the middle of a bunch of predators, it will be really tough for him. I know myself, I know Pepe (Oriola) and I know (Stefano) Comini, I hope for him he will manage to go through all the fights. I think the fight will be hard and everyone wants points, so he will have to be really careful.”

The Russian went on to explain that it is not just the Hungarian teenager who will be in danger, but everyone: “I think tomorrow’s races will be a mess, especially the first one, as I’m sure we will have a different leader than the pole sitter come the first corner.”