Thed Björk expects weight swings could see rivals ahead before Macau

Thed Björk battled his way to being the best of the four Hyundai drivers in today’s first race at Wuhan to finishing 12th, a far cry from the two poles and double victory the reigning WTCC champion scored a week ago at Ningbo, and the Swede expects it’s possible they’ll be behind before the season finale.

The rolling compensation weight calculation dealt a heavy blow to Hyundai this weekend when they were left on maximum weight, while the manufacturer which benefitted the most was Audi, which dropped 50kg of weight and are now 70kg lighter than Hyundai this weekend at Wuhan.

The lightest car of all is the Alfa Romeo Giulietta, which is 100kg lighter than Hyundai.

Björk wasn’t critical of the compensation weight system, but said it needed refining to not cause such drastic changes in performance from weekend to weekend, following Hyundai’s last write-off meeting at Zandvoort, where the South Korean manufacturer failed to score points all weekend.

“It’s a new championship and they are merging the FIA ways with the BoP, and I think it’s difficult when something starts to swing at the beginning of the year, and then keeps swinging heavily,” said Björk to TouringCarTimes.

“I’m sure they’ll figure out the system more next year and it should be a smoother swing. I was nine-tenths off in qualifying and in the race, but at Ningbo we were so close, while the Audi was fast at Ningbo as well. But we got the swing of weight from when we lost Zandvoort in our calculation.

“(Our rivals) will get the points back this weekend; we’ll see what happens in Suzuka and if we get closer to each other (in terms of weight), else they will overtake us and when it comes to Macau they’ll be ahead of us, but then we won’t have the weight.

“The idea’s good, but for many reasons the swings have been a bit too heavy this year, but it’s not easy to start a new championship and get it right from the start. “