Jean-Karl Vernay willing to fight for the title at Barcelona

Jean-Karl Vernay scored the perfect weekend at Monza, claiming pole position and two race wins in his Audi RS 3 LMS. The Frenchman admitted he fulfilled his ambitions for the event, and he will now hunt the crown at the season finale at Barcelona, although he admits it will not be easy to beat championship leader Mikel Azcona on home soil, as he is 19 points off the lead.

“I was expecting to close the gap, but to be honest it doesn’t make much of a difference to be second or third,” said the WRT driver to TouringCarTimes. “Of course I would have hoped to close the gap even more, but we did the maximum we could do, pole position and two wins. Perfect job by the team, now we have a chance.”

As for his chances for the season finale, Vernay believes the struggles the Audi suffered from in pre-season testing in Catalunya are still fresh in his mind, but he doesn’t let that dishearten him.

“We’ll try our best, but in official testing in WTCR we were really slow in Barcelona. We have worked a lot on the car since and we understand the tyres much better, so it should be better, but we were quite slow. It’s difficult to have an idea before we go, and of course it’s Cupra’s test track, so it’s surely going to be difficult. I’m sure we can score 20 points, we’ll see what the others do. We’ll try to score pole and a race win, but we can’t really control it. We didn’t do the perfect season and we missed an event, but I’m still very proud of the weekend, we did what we wanted to do, it’s great.”

After reporting some tyre issues yesterday, Vernay feels the behaviour of the tyres is not consistent from set to set, although he accepts it is just one of the aspects he and the team need to understand.

“I don’t really understand, there’s quite a difference between the different sets in terms of grip and traction. You never know what’s going to happen on that front. Yesterday we had issues, like we did in Assen in Race 2 and with the second set of tyres in qualifying. I’m not trying to complain or blame anyone, it’s just another ingredient in the mix we need to understand.”

Vernay now sits second in the championship, 19 points off Azcona and 1 ahead of Target Competition’s Dusan Borkovic.