Title fight still wide open, insists Esteban Guerrieri

Esteban Guerrieri is confident he can still take the fight to World Touring Car Cup rival Norbert Michelisz in Sunday’s title-deciding races at Sepang, despite the latter dominating qualifying on Friday.

Guerrieri came into the season-finale in Malaysia holding second in the standings behind Michelisz, and his position as the Hungarian’s main title threat was cemented at the end of Friday’s two qualifying sessions as fellow championship hopefuls Yvan Muller and Thed Björk faltered.

While Guerrieri could only manage tenth in the first qualifying session of the day, the Münnich Motorsport Honda driver rose to prominence in Qualifying 2, taking second behind Michelisz’s Hyundai.

That means the duo will share the front row of the grid in Sunday’s conclusive Race 3 and, although Michelisz is on pole for two of the weekend’s three races, Guerrieri remains adamant that he can overcome Michelisz’s 15-point advantage.

“It is still wide open,” said Guerrieri at the end of the day. “I am starting next to him [Michelisz] in both Race 2 and Race 3. It is not so good in Race 1, but we race until the race is over like [1950s legend Juan Manuel] Fangio used to say. Let’s see what happens with the weather as well because apparently on Sunday there is some rain coming. It will be exciting.

“Coming into the night session, the second qualifying, the car felt really hooked up, front and rear. So I started pushing and got to a very high level of performance. I was happy to be in the top five – I wanted to do that to actually have the chance to fight. Not for pole because we could see that Norbi was very fast, but P2 was my target when we saw that we had the potential. We accomplished that and extracted everything we could, so I’m proud of the team. Let’s fight on Sunday.”