Huff: We learned a lot about the car in Argentina

LADA Sport Rosneft will celebrate its 50th FIA World Touring Car Championship outing when Marrakech hosts Eurodatacar WTCC Race of Morocco this weekend.

The Russian make first appeared in the championship with its 110 model in 2008. Since then it has become established as a WTCC frontrunner with Rob Huff claiming a brace of wins last year and its all-new Vesta TC1 proving competitive in 2015 despite limited pre-season testing.

Rising Russian star Mikhail Kozlovskiy, who partners Huff and James Thompson in the three-car LADA line-up, missed the season-opener in Argentina last month while his car was in build, but will be back in action in Morocco.

“Last year I finished fifth in the second race [in Marrakech] and, for the moment, this is my best result in the WTCC. Hopefully, with the Vesta I will improve my achievements. I got my first taste of the Vesta at our technical base in Magny-Cours before our Portugal tests, and I can say that I am very satisfied with the car. It feels great, though there are some things I need to get used to, because the Vesta is different in terms of driving compared to the Granta.”

Huff, who won the first WTCC Race of Morocco in 2009, said: “We learned a lot about the car in Argentina and found a few things that we can put right and develop further, and the fact that we were P1 in Q1, shows the car has great pace. The car certainly feels fast, but we need to be careful this weekend, as a small error could see you in trouble, so we need to know when to attack and when to ease off in order to collect as much data as possible from all three cars.”

As well as marking LADA’s 50th WTCC start, this weekend is 45 years since the first road-going LADA rolled off the production line at the company’s Togliatti plant in Russia.