Pauwels avoids penalty after costly clashes with Borković and Girolami

Comtoyou Racing’s touring car racing rookie Kobe Pauwels has escaped penalty after clashes with Dušan Borković and Néstor Girolami on lap one of the second TCR World Tour race at Portimao.

Pauwels started second for the reversed grid race, but lost several places in the opening corners.

Girolami tried to take advantage, heading to the inside of Turn 4. However, he hit the kerbs as there was not enough room for himself, Pauwels and Ma Qing Hua on the outside, then drifted into Pauwels.

The pair made contact and both speared off, and when Pauwels rejoined he made wheel-to-wheel contact with Borković, sending the right-hand side of Borković’s car into the air.

The front-right wheel was destroyed as it landed back on the ground, but impressively Borković managed to get to the pits. Pauwels retired immediately, prompting a safety car period, and Girolami pitted but then retired with damage just as racing resumed.

Borković told TouringCarTimes the tyre, suspension, brake disc and steering all broke in the impact, but settled on the contact being a racing incident.

“Every driver gets his own opinion with the information [they have],” he say. “Pauwels should be, let’s say, more careful as he’s coming back onto the circuit. But I never blame anybody for these incidents. It’s okay, this is all racing.”

Girolami said his contact with Pauwels “was not hard” at Turn 4, but “suddenly I had no steering in that corner after that, it was something bent”.

ALM Motorsport did a tyre change on his new Honda Civic Type R TCR, but could do nothing about the bent steering arm. As Girolami was about to return to racing speeds on the safety car restart, it broke and left him stranded at the last corner.

“The steering wheel had a twist, so it was not okay but we wanted to continue to score some points, but it just broke,” he explained. “I wanted to return to the pits but it was not possible so we had to unfortunately retire from the race.

“It’s not the way that we wanted to finish the weekend, because the car showed a lot of pace during the weekend. And we [had the potential] today to finish in the points again but unfortunately this contact – was very, very soft, I would say not hard, but maybe at the wrong angle.

“I tried to be very, very tight on that corner to avoid having contact and give Pauwels space. But I think it was Ma also coming from the outside, and then three-wide in that corner is almost impossible.

“So I was not expecting this issue, because normally two cars is okay, but three cars maybe when the Audi got hit from Ma, this angle, unfortunately, was a little bit hard for my car.”

It was a sorry end to just the third race outing in any series for the new FL5-spec Honda.

“It’s been a really productive and positive pre-season testing,” said Girolami. “We still need to keep working on many things because it’s a new car, but the pace shows it’s a promising car.

“Always when you have a new car you need to work harder than the previous season because many things can happen, and we need to cover many points and many things. But it’s the first race in World Tour with this car. The car has been used since two or three weeks ago I think in TCR UK and TCR Italy, so we are discovering things.

“We will analyse deep what’s happened with the steering arm, because probably it was at a wrong angle as the touch was not hard at all. But we need to go in deep on that to see what we can make it stronger for next races.”