Thompson happy with Lada’s results

The LADA Sport Lukoil team successfully completed their first full WTCC season proving that performance of the Granta car were steadily improving.

After scoring points in seven races – that placed him 14th in the Drivers’ Championship – during the final event at Macau James Thompson came close to achieve LADA’s first podium result in the World Championship.

After he classified ninth in Friday’s qualifying and fourth in Sunday’s morning warm-up, Thompson was stopped in the first race by a trivial technical problem. In the second race he started from second on the top-ten reverse grid and chased the leader Tom Coronel until the two final laps, when he dropped to fourth behind Rob Huff and James Nash; eventually Thompson was punted into the wall by Pepe Oriola.

“It was a big disappointment for everyone in our team. After the restart I lost a bit of pace in the first sector but I was confident that we would be able to make it up in the second sector, where we had been very quick all weekend. I reckoned that we could even fight Tom Coronel for first place. But then, after Oriola went into me, it was impossible to carry on: a real pity!” the Briton commented.

However he is positive on how the season went: “On the whole, it’s been really good for us. Our goal was originally to be somewhere in the middle of the grid, but by the first half of the season we were already fighting in the top-ten. Then, in the Asian rounds we were in very good shape: sixth in Japan, eight in China and fighting for a podium in Macau. I’m very proud of the whole team and I’ve got no doubt that we’re going to have another even more competitive car for 2014. Before then, we’ve got a lot of work to do and there are many tests ahead of us. I’m really looking forward to next year.”