Gabriele Tarquini
Debuting in the Guia Circuit is the first running season of the FIA World Touring Car Cup (WTCR). The series comes to plug the gap left by the extinction of the former WTCC (World Touring Car Championship), merging and adopting the TCR Series regulations that features 2.0 liter turbo-charged engine touring cars.
Macau was immediately granted the status of Season Finale, where the final rounds that will award the season titles for drivers and teams will be carried out.
The racing competition is set to follow in the footsteps of the world-famous “Guia Race” first held in 1972 and with a history spanning almost half a century.
As the main worldwide competition for touring cars, the WTCR has all the ingredients to become one of the best racing events of the programme and one of the major highlights of this year.
The championship teams and drivers competing in the race have been racing in the four corners of the world, from Morocco to Japan, passing through Western, Central and Eastern Europe and with two racing events held in mainland China.
Macau will be given all the final decisions: firstly the overall team winners, where the BRC Racing Team (Hyundai) leads the table with just eight points more than MRacing-YMR (Hyundai), keeping all the possibilities open.
The third best qualified team currently is All-Ink.com Münnich Motorsport (Honda), and although its 401 points keep them well apart from the first two (510 and 502 points respectively), Münnich position is also still under fire, just 36 points behind, Sebastien Loeb Racing (Volkswagen), who is followed, 49 points behind the third, by Audi Sport Leopard Lukoil Team.
If things are unpredictable for teams, it’s even more complex for drivers.
Currently, the super experienced Italian driver Gabriele Tarquini leads the championship, driving a Hyundai from BRC Racing Team with 291 points.
Keeping Tarquini not more than an arm’s length from victory is another of the veterans of this championship, the French Yvan Muller, who, like Tarquini, has clocked many kilometers around the Guia Circuit over his many career years.
As in the case of the Italian, Muller is also racing a Hyundai, but from MRacing-YMR team, which places him behind with a margin of 39 points.
In third place, we have the Swedish racing driver Thed Bjork, teammate of Muller at MRacing-YMR team. He stands just 14 points away from Muller, making the Frenchman keep one eye up front to attack Tarquini’s position and another on the side mirrors, to defend himself against the Swedish.
If this was not enough to make this race super interesting, we must recall a few other names that will also be on the grid for this triple-race event, drivers like Pepe Oriola, Jean-Karl Vernay, Esteban Guerrieri, Norbert Michelisz and, of course, the most successful driver in touring cars around Guia, the Briton Rob Huff.
But that is not all; we must also count the experience of drivers such as Mato Homola and Tom Coronel.
On top of all these championship runners and for the Macau event, we need to add a group of local wildcards led by André Couto and that features other important names of local motorsports such as Lam Kam San, Filipe Souza, Billy Lo, Rui Valente and Kevin Tse.
If, theoretically, all the locals, with maybe the exception of Couto, start with a bigger handicap due to less experience and preparation on their cars, the fact is, there are many experienced drivers in the WTCR pack but there are also a lot of drivers who will try Macau for the first time.
Macau is well known to be merciless with any mistakes, meaning that frontrunners, while competing to the highest level, will face the threat small slips that result in big problems, as the Armco barriers are just centimeters away.
The WTCR racing action starts tomorrow with a 30 minute Free Practice to kick-off around 9 a.m., followed by a second practice on the same day at 1:30 p.m.
On Friday, the programme repeats around the same time, but for the Qualifying general session in the morning and the split qualifying into Q1, Q2 and Q3 in the afternoon.
On Saturday the first race (eight laps) is scheduled to start around 2:30 p.m. and the WTCR programme will finish off the big day of the GP with Race 2 (eight laps) to be held around 8:30 a.m., with the longer and final race (Race 3) to be held at 11 a.m.
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