Tom Chilton happy with sixth after struggling in the wet in China

Tom Chilton was the best-placed of Sébastien Loeb Racing’s drivers in qualifying at Ningbo in China, despite all three drivers struggling to find pace in the wet conditions with their Citroën C-Elysée WTCCs.

The 32-year-old managed to hustle his Citroën into sixth, just missing out on the top five, after working on the set-up throughout practice, languishing down in 13th in Free Practice 1 before going fourth fastest in the second session.

Chilton’s team-mates John Filippi and Mehdi Bennani were further down the order, with Filippi ninth and Bennani down in 13th in qualifying.

“We’ve always struggled in the wet, and out of the box we proved it as we were 3.5 seconds off the pace,” said Chilton to TouringCarTimes. “Both Mehdi and I were on the limit, so we knew we had to change a lot.

“But in FP2, I was four-tenths better than Mehdi so I felt I was going in a better direction and carried on that way for qualifying and it worked really well,” he added.

However, Chilton rues a strategic blip after he worked his way through his tyre availability more quickly than he expected.

“My biggest problem was I didn’t have enough tyres,” he said. “I only had two new fronts for my last run in qualifying. I was happy because I was fourth in FP2, but that’s probably because I had the four new tyres on, and I didn’t even get to have four new tyres for qualifying. “