Muller : The car is faster, the track is slower

Members of the Citroën Total WTCC team are confident but not over-optimistic after their three cars ranked on top of today’s test session at Marrakech.

“It was a good result, but it’s only the first step. It’s difficult to know what the other teams were doing in the session. For sure we put all we had because we wanted to know where we are. And it was important for the whole team to have a good feeling and be confident for the rest of the weekend,” team principal Yves Matton said.

Yvan Muller added: “We are working hard and driving flat out to check about our potential, but we will only see the real performance tomorrow in the qualifying.”

Lap times were not as fast as expected compared to previous years - 2013 pole was 1:44.358, one-and-a-half tenth faster than Muller’s fastest lap today.

“Maybe today’s times will be improved in tomorrow’s sessions. However the track is a bit different from last year, but the biggest difference is that with the new TC1 cars we cannot cut the chicanes as much as we did before. And that cutting was worth two or three seconds per lap. The cars are definitely much faster than last year, but this is compensated by the fact that the track is much slower,” Muller explained.