Gianni Morbidelli optimistic for tomorrow

Gianni Morbidelli took pole position, albeit not in a dominant fashion as Free Practice 1 would have suggested. The Italian praised his team’s work on the new version of the Honda Civic TCR, which was improved a lot overnight.

“The car is new, we did a couple of tests in Italy and I thought they were enough to be prepared, but WestCoast Racing improved the car further, so a big thank you to the team,” said the former Grand Prix driver. “The car must be the basis for future developements, so to be on par with the old version straight away is good, nevermind taking pole position! I am really happy, although I know we need to improve the car a lot more than this, because the others will make huge steps forward as well.”

As for his pole position, Morbidelli was aware of the potential of the car, but how it will behave during the race is a big question mark for him and the team: “I cannot say I am surprised, because we started from a very good basis. This is a new car, but it is also an evolution, a step further from the good car we already had. Of course this is a great result, but you can also see from Kevin (Gleason)’s result that the Honda was competitive anyway. We know that we have a problem with temperatures, so I don’t know how it would behave in the slipstream of another car, especially with such high temperatures. However, our long run was very good this morning, so we can be confident of taking a good result come tomorrow.”

When asked about how important it was to have saved tryes by only doing one timed lap per session in Qualifying, the Italian said they were already thinking about Macau when they decided the strategy: “It is true that we saved some tyres,” admitted Morbidelli to TouringCarTimes. “However, rather than tomorrow, we were trying to save them for Macau. We know how much of an advantage it is to test with fresh tyres on such a difficult track. It was a bit risky, but we played our game and it worked out.”

Morbidelli will start from pole position for tomorrow’s Race 1.