Gianni Morbidelli laments performance gap compared to SEAT

Gianni Morbidelli finished the TCR International Series’ curtain raiser in second place. The Italian was fourth after the start, and played a big part in the spectacular race by overtaking Sergey Afanasyev and James Nash to put his WestCoast Racing Honda Civic TCR in second.

Despite the positive result, the Honda driver acknowledged a lack of pace compared to the SEAT Leóns: “Pepe (Oriola) is right: we are not as quick as the SEAT cars,” said the Italian. “It is clear that we have to work a lot to catch up, but the race was very useful to understand where we are and to see our strong and weak points.”

Speaking of the race, the WestCoast Racing driver enjoyed the battles on track and the final result: “There was some good fighting along the way too, that’s nice too, but the most important was that I could score good points for myself and WestCoast. Second today is a very good result towards the championship.”

Morbidelli will start from seventh for tomorrow’s reversed grid race.