Photo: CTCC

Leo Yi delighted with Ningbo double but fears weight trouble

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Leo Yi launched back into the lead of the China Touring Car Championship after winning both races at Ningbo, and is now 26.5 points clear of Kia team-mate Jason Zhang in the standings, but the Hong Kong driver fears the retaliatory compensation weight the team’s K3s will now have to carry.

Yi overtook Darryl O’Young’s BAIC Senova on the final lap in Race 1 to secure the victory, while he worked his way from ninth to first in the reversed grid Race 2, racking up his third win of the year, and giving Kia a healthy 52.5 point lead in the manufacturers’ classification.

“The start was mega, the launch control worked really well, then I was following Couto but my team-mate who started from pole stalled the car and I moved to the right and he was right in front of me,” Yi said to TouringCarTimes.

“I followed the group and somehow everyone else just went away, and I was then P4, my team-mate made a mistake so I overtook him. Couto was a struggle, as their car was really fast, and our car is really struggling for straight-line speed. He pulled away, and then caught up with my team-mate so I was able to catch the group. I knew if he overtook my team-mate then it was done, so I made a move and he was really respectful and gave me room as we were side-by-side on the outside of the hairpin.”

With no team orders at the team with both Yi and Zhang fighting for the title, Yi had to find his own way past the rival Kia K3, and couldn’t even negotiate with his team to employ team orders.

“I caught my team-mate, who was struggling with the power steering and was avoiding all the kerbs in the second sector, so I was able to catch him a lot. I wanted to ask the team to tell him to either use the kerbs or let me past, because the group were catching up, but my radio was broken. So I just had to risk it to overtake him.”

Kia will now be on the maximum level of compensation weight going into this weekend’s races at Wuhan.

“I’m worried about the weight, as we’ll now be on maximum weight at Wuhan, so we’ll really struggle,” he said. “We’ll see this year, last year was really good, I was really close to Rob Huff, but we’ll see this year with a heavy car.”