ROAL Motorsport’s Tom Coronel in his 320 TC finished second in race one when the World Touring Car Championship ran for the first time at Moscow Raceway. Coronel spent the entire race challenging Chevrolet’s Yvan Muller, whose winning margin over the BMW racer was just half a second.
A first turn incident brought out a yellow flag, and then a red flag when the rescue vehicle broke down. BMW racers Fredy Barth, Charles Ng, and Darryl O’Young (Coronel’s teammate) were involved in the incident.
Chevrolet’s Michael Nykjaer won race two ahead of Muller. The best BMW finishers were Stefano D’Aste in eighth and O’Young in ninth.
In the days leading up to the event autosport.com reported that BMW would likely not return to WTCC in 2014, when new regulations are scheduled to be put in place. The site quoted BMW Motorsport Director Jens Marquardt as saying “"I just can't see how we can get a powertrain together for the new regulations, which still aren't even set. They're talking about 400bhp. That's impossible for us.
"We didn't do a global race engine. Our TC engine was done on a 1.6-litre production block, and that's where our limitation is.
"We're already at the limit of performance on it and I've been told the FIA is targeting performance beyond what we can reach.
"Even the TC engine, which works with the current regulations, is not really the best of the projects we've done from a commercial point of view, so there's nothing really for us to look into."—Brian S. Morgan
