Starting this topic with sad news: Seat factory team pulls out...

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/80848



Calendar:

07/03 Brazil - Curitiba

11/04 Mexico - Puebla

02/05 Marocco - Marrakech

23/05 Italy - Monza

20/06 Belgium - Zolder

04/07 Portugal - Algarve

18/07 Great Britain - Brands Hatch

01/08 Czech Republic - Brno

05/09 Germany - Oschersleben

09/09 Spain - Valencia Ricardo Tormo

31/10 Japan - Okayama

21/11 Macau - Macau



New season, new challenges!

50 DAYS TO GO!

And I guess that's pretty much the story of 2010...

Nothing new there, SEAT was going to leave as a factory team anyway. There seems to be this little thing called a recession going on and motorsport won't be able to avoid it.

They're left with a couple of BMW drivers, 3 Chevys and ... Ladas!
Great line-up, may be, just may be, there must be something horribly wrong with the rules!? Hmmm.

This concept is dead in the water, you can't have popular TC races with heavy vehicles powered by 280 bhp engines. It's just not exciting. DTM and V8s are so much more popular, even though so much more expensive, because they are actually exciting cars.
You won't get 100,000 strong crowd because of V4 280 bhp Cruze on pole, 580 bhp V8 Holden on the other hand sounds much better ;)

They still weigh 1000 kg, same as super tourer, despite modern heavy bodyshells with 5star safety ratings. Also they have 300 hp. So they are as fast as ST now, with expensive ultra-lightweight components just the same or even more... they just look and sound a bit underdone.

Something like GT3 for 4 doors would be good, M3 4 door, Lexus ISF etc, It's comical that a slow racing lada s2000 and a fast racing aston martin gt3 should cost the same amount!
The sealed shocks and banning of aerodynamic and engine tuning found in GT3, would help private touring car entrants be more competitive against works ones too?

(also holden v8supercar has closer to 680 hp than 580 hp ;) )

Firstly, it would be nice if they had better TV on free-to-air all around the world though to start.

Great calendar etc though. It would be nice if they should add Bathurst for the next one, they could be a support race for the Bathurst 12 hr?

It already was a crappy championship stuffed with weight penalties and team orders that made impossible to recognize the best driver/cars.

Its (near) demise is no loss to motorsport.

The only good thing in it was Alex Zanardi:I'd follow him even if he races tricycles, which btw seems exactly what he's going to do at Paralympic games

Good riddance to Seat, their constant whining, team orders, and the willingness of the FIA to concede to everything they asked for, was one of the major things wrong with the championship.

It's not a bad championship, the racing is good, what it needs is more exciting cars, more manufacturers that aren't dicks like Seat, and longer races.

S2000 has run it's course, and the series really does seem to be in trouble. DTM isn't much better with the lack of racing due to team orders and rubbish aerodynamics. But the Italian Superstars series is continuing to grow, and that concept is really cool and puts on some great racing.

Yeah, Superstars is exciting racing, big powerful cars, not shopping carts.
Btw, V8 Fireworks are you sure S2000 are as fast as STs? I dunno which tracks hasn't had any changes since then to compare. It's still 10 yrs developments... in excitement, I recently watched BTCC reviews and STs were just proper.

Short movie about Tom Coronel ariving at the Curitiba track for this weekend opening races,

see the movie(link) on the FORIX.com FB group=

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111194985401

Looks like Chevy might run away with it...

BMW's should be stronger in race but it'll be difficult to overtake. I think there's rain forecast for the race so that could spice things up a bit.

live timing

I'm rooting for rookie driver Norbert Michelisz , he's Hungarian like me, it's good to see at least one Hungarian driver in an a relatively good international series... and he's been quite promising so far!

I just wanted to point out that he was really good in practice and qualifying. He beat all other Seats in Q1 and if not that off at the penultimate corner in Q2...
Will keep fingers crossed for him.

From reports it's been he had a broken diffuser (although he did it for himself during his last flying lap before) during his q2 attempt and he will be racing without that part because the airflow below the chassis was seriously damaged. That was why he spun during q2 too.

I'm hungarian too and rooting for him !

michelisz - car control

Watched that live yesterday. I fully expected him to cream into the side of one of the Chevrolets but impressive recovery. The rookies are looking impressive in WTCC this year with perhaps the exception of Vaulkhard. What is he doing in WTCC? Wasn't even competitive in BTCC.

found a live-streaming of eurosport (french), just copy/paste the link into wmp
rtsp://76.73.49.98/eurosport

As last year, it's a wet track.

The Puebla round has been cancelled hasn't it?

Anyway, 5 mins to go

Not a clue. Still raining quite heavily by the looks of it. Race 1 will definitely be wet, obviously got to wait to see what happens for race 2, but unless it stops raining relatively soon, I'd guess race 2 will probably start wet as well.

Safety car start. 2 laps behind it to assess the conditions, race will be extended to 16 laps.

Doesn't work...

There's a link to a stream on the main page of the wtcc website. it's on the right hand side under the video section.

Drying out quite nicely in places now. If it doesn't rain again, race 2 will almost certainly be a dry race.

Very dull first race, let's hope the mixed up grid spices things up.

It didn't. Sadly it seems that the depth in the series has been hurt by the loss of competitive teams and drivers, meaning that only seven-eight drivers can possibly get any shot at victory during this season.

Yeah, two very boring races!

BTCC is where its at!

Bit of a snooze wasn't it?

A pity! The grid looks really depleted this year.

Might not be a vintage year with so little competition going on...

Second race was really pointless but the first one on wet track was a little bit better.
Economical downturn had its impact on the grid but FIA's tampering with regulations was at least equally responsible. And with hindsight we can say that allowing diesels in was not a good solution. Now we have fruits of that decision in our hands. WTCC was in very good state only a year ago but now I'm not certain if it can survive with only two manufacturers.
I don't think there's so little competition. Quality (all WTCC champions are present) is still there and as Andy Priaulx put it, you only need one competitor to make your life hard. I expect Chevy to take the title this year. IMO they have now all ingredients for the championship and short grid is surely not their fault. Seat will probably fade in the second half of the season due to the lack of development, but I guess BMW remains strong and keeps fighting.

What a disgrace, first race 50% under yellow, at least 50% under yellow and still a guy like Farfus who can crash into everybody without consequences. Shameful

In DTM thread , you can find that someone say WTCC is far more better than DTM. WTCC is a joke, isn't it?

This track and these race organizers are a joke. Otherwise, if you follow WTCC, you should know it's generally more exciting than DTM.

Fortunately Porto and Pau are gone and there will be only one more street race this year, in Macau.

I 've followed it since 2006.It's getting worse and worse. Cheap cars and unknown drivers. Now I decide to drop it and focus on GT1, at least GT1 has some supercars. But DTM is still the 1st choice, especially BMW's return in 2012.!

How is that different from last year?

Hmmm, two laps of racing in Morocco ... even with the seriously-reduced grid for this year, is it even worth going to Marrakech if we keep having races like this?

Dear WTCC,

Watch BTCC and learn

Cheers,
Phil

F2 was more of the same. There shouldn't be more race there.

Safety cars don't work for short races. Most of the race is gone by the time the mess is cleared up. They should have stopped the race and restarted.

Absolute joke of a race in Morocco. They might as well have not bothered - 2 racing laps out of 13? Why even bother going all the way to Morocco and setting up a temporary street circuit for 2 stupidly short 11 lap races? What a farce.

And whilst those Chevys are ugly as sin, they seem to have the edge over BMW from the looks of it (barring Priaulx's lucky reverse-grid "gift" win).

A complete waste of time today. These short races just fizzle out when a safety car comes along.

The cars are similar in price to GT3 (Ferrari, Aston Martin etc) or V8Supercars... they are not cheap.

The drivers include the likes of Priaulx, Menu, Monteiro etc who are rather well known.

As if the races weren't already ridiculously short without safety cars...

I think they should forget about Marrakech unless they're willing to bring experienced foreign marshalls. Even then, the circuit seems better for crashing than for racing.

And Farfus is still a twat.

Yeah, someone needs to figure out what the red flag is for

Bump. For the season is still going on. Good to see Priaulx back to his best and in the title hunt.

In other news, BMW may pull out of WTCC for a DTM programme.

Conversely they might pull out of sportscar racing, but haven't they only just entered?

Pull out of either a World series, to go to a National series, albeit a massive one. I hope they pull out of WTCC, then put Andy Priaulx into Sportscars. The WTCC is a joke of a series nowadays.

There's a wtcc thread??

Actually just thinking, how long did the old M3 program run for, the one they with which they won the nurgburgring 24 a few years ago.

Why not put Priaulx in one of the DTM-cars they probably will enter?