Honda Racing drivers dig deep for points on Aragon race day

Finishing both races was a positive to begin with. Overall it was a fun race day: I had good starts both times and tried to pull some good moves during the first few laps, which was satisfying even though I knew it would not be possible to keep many cars behind for long. The other positive is that we could keep pace with the pack ahead in Race Two and we had a very good balance. I feel like I extracted the maximum I could so I’m happy with that, because we can only fight with what we have in our hands. We came here to do our best and we did it, so I’m thankful to the team for that.

As we expected it was a difficult weekend, but at least we scored points in both races. This weekend we tried plenty of different things with the Civic Type R TCR but there was not much difference each time. We are missing a lot of top speed and on this kind of track we suffer a lot as a result, especially with such a long straight that counts for a lot of the lap time. The weekend is done now and there is nothing we can change about it, so we need to move forward and work even harder for Vila Real, because it’s a track that should suit the car much better.

We were bracing ourselves for a tough weekend as historically Aragon has never been kind to us, and so it proved to be. Nevertheless, we did not expect the gap to be as big as it was and that is even after we worked hard overnight to improve our Honda Civic Type R TCR. We have had issues and have been working to make it better, but no matter what we do there is a limit to how much our efforts can bring in - we've had our eyes open to that for some time now. It’s not an amazing situation to be in going to my home race so we need to be realistic about this, just as we were coming here.

That was a very hard pair of races. In Race One I had a great start and stayed clear of any contact, and then I had pretty much the same pace as Esteban or I was possibly even quicker. I felt like I could catch him and maybe in the last few laps I would have a chance to overtake him, but then I had a tyre delamination on the main straight and that was it. Race Two was much hotter and the pace didn’t feel as good, although the gap to the frontrunners was a little hard to believe. It was a hard race so it was all about collecting what points we could, which we managed.