Gianni Morbidelli unable to solve grip issues

Despite clocking the best lap time in free practice Gianni Morbidelli went no further than sixth in his WestCoast Racing Honda Civic TCR. The Italian continues to have the same issues he had this morning, as the car is quite unpredictable and difficult to drive.

“We are lacking grip in general,” said the Italian to TouringCarTimes. “We struggle to get heat in the tyres and this makes the car difficult to drive. We are confused to be honest, we have setup issues. The performance window is very small, as soon as you get out of that problems come up, and it penalises you a lot.”

Morbidelli remains convinced the grip offered by the Oschersleben asphalt is too low to generate enough temperature in the tyres: “The tarmac doesn’t give much grip, and we suffer from that. Although I was fastest in free practice 2 I was not as quick as I should have been, it’s pretty much the same lap time I did in qualifying. I could probably have improved by a tenth in Q2, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, that’s not the point. The car is very difficult to drive.”

The WestCoast Racing driver is now thinking about the adjustments the team can make to the car, but the lack of time between the two races will make it hard to go back to an acceptable level if things go wrong: “Trying to invent something is very risky, you need to turn the car upside down, but you can make a step backwards and you don’t have much time to fix that if you get it wrong, so we are deciding what to do by looking at the data.”

Although a 10-minute shakedown is scheduled for tomorrow morning, Morbidelli believes the weather conditions will make it useless to solve his problems: “The shakedown will not be too useful to that respect, because the temperatures will be lower and it will generate even less grip. My feeling is that the car is unpredictable, it changes all the time, and we don’t have a precise problem. We have both understeer and oversteer, we can’t really focus on something. I think it’s the symptom of the tyres not working properly.”

The first race will start at 13:00 local time.