...or was it diesel?
Anyway, Gabriele Tarquini's back, as Lukoil join SUNRED Engineering for the 2011 season. Thereby allowing the pseudo-independent outfit to continue for another year, with manufacturer SEAT pretty much out of world motorsport entirely following the closure of its Supercopa & Eurocup series.
Alexander Dudukalo is the man to thank. The Russian moves up from the now deceased SEAT Eurocup along with Pepe Oriola to the top flight World Touring Car Championship. Although the duo were interestingly described by SUNRED boss Joán Orus recently as "two young drivers" to Autosport...Dudukalo is over twice as old as his new team-mate. Though that may make him sound old, he's only 34...yikes!
The main news is that the 2009 World Touring Car champion will return with SUNRED, despite some indications he made late in 2010 saying he probably wouldn't be if he had to go through another season like that.
Unfortunately, he's probably discovered there's nowhere else to be at the moment, rather than expecting a real challenge for the title in 2011. This is because SUNRED will have an unsurmountable handicap starting the season with the 2.0 litre TDI engine. The diesel may have been the scourge of the 2008-2009 seasons, but with no further development and the 1.6 litre turbo-charged petrol engines that Chevrolet & BMW will run against them this year, Tarquini and his SUNRED team-mates will be struggling with non-podium finishes until SUNRED is ready to race its 1.6 turbo, even possibly at the mercy of a number of independent BMWs.
The concerns over the competitiveness of the SEAT León TDI have been made clear by the only other team that was running them last year, with Zengo Motorsport saying they won't be racing the León this year, and we believe that car they're switching to is also the BMW 320 TC.
With almost all touring car level drives in all national series (with the exception of the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship) requiring the driver to bring his own budget, if Tarquini wanted to stay busy for 2011, his only choice was to stay with a works(ish) team in the WTCC - Chevrolet were all booked up, so it had to be SEAT.
The Italian will have to just run a holding pattern campaign, helping SUNRED develop the 1.6 turbo for later in the year and look forward to 2012.
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