John Filippi admits he is already on the limit at Vallelunga

John Filippi is back at the pinnacle of touring car racing after a five-year absence from a full world touring car season.

The Volcano Motorsport driver is enjoying his time in the World Tour, having topped yesterday’s afternoon testing session and coming second in free practice two at Vallelunga.

“I’m very happy to be back on the world stage after a few years in TCR Europe,” said the Frenchman to TouringCarTimes.

“I have good pace, despite this being a new adventure with a new team at the world championship level.”

Filippi is aware the top teams and drivers are hiding their true performance at this stage.

“I don’t think anyone is at maximum pace, eveyone is sandbagging a little,” he added. “We’ve seen some sectors from both yesterday and today that we don’t quite understand, so I suspect they are hiding their true performance.

“We are just focussing on ourselves to try to improve our package. The car is the same as last year, so we have to push in every session to make sure we have the performance that the team and I expect from ourselves.”

As to what he can achieve in tomorrow’s qualifying, the Frenchman believes he has to just focus on himself as the true pace of his competitors is unclear.

“We know that we miss a few tenths in the last sector, but generally we’re on the limit of what we can do,” he said. “We tried a few things in FP1 and FP2, so I know it will be difficult to improve massively compared to what we’ve already shown.

“Traffic doesn’t help either, so I think we need to put everything together I expect to be at the front of the grid. If that’s not the case we’re ready for some hard work anyway.”

Filippi appeared in five TCR World Tour rounds last year, winning the second race at Spa-Francorchamps in a Comtoyou Audi RS 3 LMS.