Thed Björk not worried about lack of pace in testing

Polestar Cyan Racing’s Thed Björk finished the first session of the weekend at Marrakech, Morocco, down in 13th place. With the Volvo S60 WTCC a protagonist early on in the weekend at most tracks, the driver is still not worried about the lack of performance so far, as the team is willing to try different set-up ideas during free practice tomorrow.

“I am not concerned,” said the Swede to TouringCarTimes. “The reason why we were not up to speed straight away is that this track is completely different to what I’ve experienced so far with this car. We need to adapt and adjust the car and see if we can go faster tomorrow.”

“Of course we have a lot of ideas and a lot of things to test tomorrow, but coming here with a new car there was not much we could do before driving on the actual track, so we wanted to drive first and then make the changes. As you can see from the lap times we were a bit off today, but we need to make changes and see what happens tomorrow.”

With the new twisty layout of the Marrakech circuit, Björk found some similarities with the old Gothenburg street circuit the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship used to visit: “We have a track similar to this in Sweden, which is Gothenburg, although it no longer exists. I won most of the races we held there, I love street circuits and I think we can get up to speed here as well, so I am really positive for tomorrow.”

Given the difficulties Volvo encountered today and the reduced chances to overtake, Björk could try and target the reversed grid pole position, but that would have been against the philosophy Polestar Cyan Racing are adopting in their first year in the WTCC: “I will not try to get a reversed grid pole position, and I actually like this, because all we want to do is going as fast as possible and learning as much as possible, so we are just focusing on adjusting the car, finding the speed and developing it all the time. For now I’m not concerned, it will probably be a different story next year, but for now we need to keep working.”

Thed Björk took his career-best result in Hungary two weeks’ ago, claiming fourth in the Volvo S60 WTCC.