Morbidelli ends Citroën winning streak

The 2014 World Touring Car Championship turned a page at the Hungaroring, today, with Citroën being beaten for the first time since the manufacturer’s arrival in the WTCC.

While Yvan Muller scored another win in the first race, Gianni Morbidelli chalked up his first-ever WTCC win when he dominated the second race in his Münnich Motorsport Chevrolet RML Cruze.

The Citroën team still scored a 1-2 victory in Race 1, with Yvan Muller finishing ahead of José María López and Honda’s Tiago Monteiro. In the second race Morbidelli led the proceedings from start till finish, though Monteiro was never more than half a second away from the Chevrolet’s rear bumper.

The effect of the Citroën cars being weighed down by 60 kilograms of compensation weight showed especially in Race 2, where the first C-Elysée finished an atypical fifth. Though the Hungaroring is known for being hard to overtake on, the performance of the Chevrolet and Honda cars showed that the French ‘armada’ is no longer invincible, as Tom Coronel proved by keeping Muller and López at bay for the entire race to score a well-deserved fourth place.

Nine-time World Rally Champion Sébastien Loeb had his worst WTCC weekend so far this year as a botched start in Race 1 dropped him from third on the grid to seventh at the end of the first lap, behind all four Honda drivers.

Local hero, Norbert Michelisz, had an unfortunate qualifying session on Saturday which saw him outside the top ten when a suspension part broke on his hot lap. The Hungarian still salvaged a sixth place in the first race and a tenth in the second, cheered on by a huge partisan crowd that flocked to the circuit in spite of bad weather; official attendance was 58,000 over the two days.

In the TC2T class, the Liqui Moly BMW team again had a walk in the park, with Pasquale Di Sabatino scoring his first win of the season in the first race, before team owner Franz Engstler scored his fifth victory in the second.

In the world championship standings, López still leads with 115 points, but team-mate Muller is now within ten points of the Argentine.

The championship will resume next week at the Slovakia Ring, on May 11 for rounds 7 and 8.